On February 15th Jerry went to North Memorial because he felt he was having some blockage in his stomach, not unlike what he's experienced many times since his motorcycle accident in August of 2015 that led to a three month stay at North Memorial (for more on that, his last caring bridge can be viewed here:
https://www.caringbridge.org/visit/jerryyager). The typical procedure is to hold him in the hospital and give him medication that removes the blockage in his intestines, but this time that was not an option because of the severity of the blockage. They were forced to operate and remove the part of his intestine with the blockage and then reconnected it.
After the surgery was completed he also developed pneumonia and had a lot of trouble breathing because of that and his Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD). He was therefore intubated (a process where a tube is inserted through the mouth down the airway to help the person breath - commonly referred to as being put on a ventilator) and medicated the pneumonia. His breathing got better after a few days so they switched him to a nasal cannula for breathing support to see if his lungs could begin to support him better on their own. That varied for a number of days but became increasingly difficult so they switched him back to intubation so his lungs didn't need to work so hard on breathing and could instead work on healing.
It was later realized that the initial surgery was not as successful as hoped because the reconnected part of the intestine was leaking fluid and was likely causing the pneumonia. They attempted to operate to clean out the intestines, and then later operated again in an attempt to reconnect the intestines, but they were unable to because the intestines were too agitated to be reconnected. Additional operations will be needed to fix this unfortunately.
