Bob Schmidt

Welcome to our CaringBridge website. We are using it to keep family and friends updated in one place. We appreciate your support and words of hope and encouragement. Thank you for visiting.
Bob's story starts on June 29 the day he first started running a fever. The first week he wasn't very sick just kinda tired ,achy and a fever but he still fed his fish and worked in the office on ordering,paying bills,etc. But as it turned into the second week he steadily got worse .His fever got higher and just kinda hovered around 102 and very tired. The next few days were up and down with feeling a little better and then a little worse. He did try the pulmicort treatments a couple times on Monday evening (July 6) and again on Tuesday morning but never felt like they helped him at all. Early Wednesday morning we both realized he was not going to get better on his own. He did have an appointment for that afternoon but when I called in they told me to get him to the ER when I told them he couldn't get his sats above 84 and he was struggling to breathe..So we went ! They did a chest x-ray and admitted him to the covid floor. The next day it became apparent that he would need more oxygen than they could give him on the floor so off to ICU they took him. They hooked him up to high flow oxygen. Bob told me that the nose prongs on the canula are much longer than a regular one and the tubing is as big as a garden hose so it can deliver much more oxygen to his starved lungs. They also started high powered steroids, antibiotics, large amounts of vitamin D and C and daily shots of blood thinner. He was in ICU for 9 days. They moved him back to the covid floor on the 17th(Friday) . It was looking real promising that he would be able to go home on Tuesday but Monday morning he started having a lot of pain in his abdomen area and several things were tried to make him feel better and figure out what was causing the pain. Finally a CT scan was ordered and he was told they had found a pool of blood in his abdominal cavity and he was going back to ICU.Monday evening they took him to the OR to do a scope to see if they could see what was causing the blood. Couldn't find an active bleed so decided to watch him carefully through the night and a team of doctors would evaluate him in the morning. Well he continued to have lots of pain and pressure through the night. Around 8 they decided to take him back to the OR and try again to figure this out. During the procedure he coded on them. The nurse called and said your husband's heart has stopped they are performing CPR! Talk about heart stopping for the rest of us too! He revived and they finished the procedure.They had went in laproscopically to find out what was causing this all. They cauterized a place where they thought he was bleeding and sent him back to ICU. Well the pressure continued to mount and finally caused his heart to stop again. They used the paddles but couldn't get a pulse . His surgeon told me he walked into his room realized what was going on and slashed him with his scalpel across his belly and they immediately had a pulse. So they rushed him into surgery and found a bleeding blood vessel behind his organs close to his spine. They cauterized the vessel and drained 2 liters of blood /fluid out of him . His surgeon told me they had 3 surgeons working on him and assessing the situation and they were confident they had finally found the problem. They left him open just in case the pressure would build again and last night they went back in and cleaned the wound and checked for any more bleeds and they were able to sew him back up. So that brings the story up to today...