Mary Schoenleber

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Mary came for a week long visit to Biloxi about a week after Easter. She flew into New Orleans, where I picked her up. It was pouring rain the entire week but we ignored the weather and did everything we had planned anyway. We toured a plantation - in the pouring rain - the day she arrived. Then we spent two nights in the French Quarter and walked around - in the pouring rain - for a day and a half, visiting three different museums and taking an evening ghost tour - in the pouring rain, lightning included.  We had a great time though.

We did get one day where it stopped raining long enough for us to take a fantastic swamp tour. We saw over 20 alligators, a wild pig (mean and ugly) and a bunch of cute little raccoons on their hind legs begging for food. Then we spent the rest of the week in Biloxi.

The reason I am mentioning all this is because I suspect that Mary was having a lot of pain in her knee that she wasn't mentioning or complaining about.  

Fast forward to Friday, April 30th. Mary came home to her apartment and fell in the hallway outside her door. She couldn't get up but was able to reach across the hall and knock on the neighbor's door. The neighbor was kind enough to help her into her apartment. The next day the on-site apartment manager went to check on her and found that she had fallen again in her apartment and couldn't get up. He called 911 and she was taken to the hospital.

I finally got word of this on Monday, May 3rd. The apartment owner got in touch with me and told me what had happened but didn't know where Mary was. Fortunately, I called the nearest hospital and that is where she was.

I talked to her on the phone, and she told me she had a knee infection in the area that she had a knee replacement last year. She didn’t seem too worried about it, more like annoyed.

I went up to Minneapolis to visit on Wednesday and by then they had done a surgery to clean out the knee and she was having blood oxygen level problems. At this point it had developed into sepsis.

I figured 'okay, they will give her antibiotics and she will be fine' and I went home so I could be home for Mother's Day, taking along her cat for safekeeping.

I went back to Minneapolis on Monday, May 10th thinking we would be almost done with this and she would be about ready to go home. Nope. The knee infection was getting worse, and they had to do another surgery to clean it out. She also developed infection in her lungs probably due to the fluid that was building up all over while her kidneys were not doing their job. By this point her blood oxygen was so compromised that they had to intubate her for the surgery.  What this meant was that they had to put her on a ventilator.

It was around this time that one of the doctors talked about it now being septic shock.

On Monday, May 17th, two days ago, they decided to try to take her off the ventilator. That only lasted a few hours. Back onto the ventilator.