Bob Osterrieder

Welcome to our website. We've created it to keep friends and family updated about our awesome father and husband

We will do our best to keep everyone up to date here as we tackle this together.

Thanks for all the support and prayers via the guestbook and elsewhere...it really goes a very long way especially through all the waiting. Excited to pass along all these messages to my dad in the near future.



Bob's health problems started approximately December 2010/January 2011 with vision problems. The opthalmalogist he saw thought he had a muscle problem and time would take care of it. He finally decided to get a second opinion and was referred to a retina specialist in May 2011. The specialist referred him immediately to the Presbyterian emergency room. The ER nurse was the one who informed us that Bob had an irregular heart rate which was something new. He was admitted and the neurologists determined that he had high cranial pressure and swollen optic nerves which they said were caused by pseudo tumor cerebri. It was during his one week hospital stay that they also found he was suffering from sleep apnea. The planned course of treatment was medication with diuretics.

The treatment was working because the opthalmalogist was seeing improvement in the optic nerves until June 2011. At that time a neurosurgeon was consulted and a decision was made to place a shunt in Bob's brain to drain excess fluid. This shunt worked until Halloween 2011 when they decided to replace the shunt.

After missing a dozen or so weeks of work, Bob returned to work in January 2012. He struggled through the continued double vision problems but the opthalmalogist kept informing us that she was seeing improvement and that it just takes time. Bob was extremely excited to be negotiating contracts for Westinghouse and had a spark in his eyes that hadn't been there for months.

It was while he was traveling in Kansas that he called to say he needed to get back in to see the opthalmalogist because he had noticed a change in his vision. Once again, neurosurgery was consulted and a shunt revision was suggested. It was the day after the shunt revision (5/12?) that Michele and I noticed that he was really confused. That same night he was moved to the neurotrauma ICU. The Journal picks up with much of the story from here.