van Hoek Family

Welcome to our CaringBridge site. We've created it to keep friends and family updated. We appreciate your support and words of hope and encouragement during this time when it matters most. As you all know by now, Eric has suffered head injuries and fractured his skull (he broke his occipital, ear bone and frontal left bone) when he tripped and fell Saturday night. In addition to these bone fractures, he suffered some bleedings in the left side of his brain. He was operated on Sat. night to remove the blood and fluids that had built up between his skull and brain. Since then, he has been kept in sedation with medication. Sedation is needed to allow the swelling of the brain to subside. Brain activity causes swelling of the brain at this stage of the recuperation. A daily CT scan is taken to gauge the progress of recuperation of the brain. So far there have been no changes on the CT scans, which is good news. When the daily scan shows less swelling, the medication will be lowered and Eric will slowly awake. It is at this stage that the possibility of swelling-up again needs to monitored very carefully. More swelling has not happen since Sat night. If swelling at this stage occurs, he will be given more medication and the process is repeated again. For now, we have no choice but to take the situation on a day-by-day basis. My brother (fluent in Spanish) and sister flew in from the Netherlands and have been with me for the past 2 days as well as Stephanie who flew in from Dallas yesterday morning.
I can’t even begin to tell you all how much it means to know you are all out there thinking of us. You just never know how your life can be completely changed in a split second. Much love from all of us in Madrid.