Friends, I need to ask you all for some big time, heavy-duty prayers for the Hemmer family. In my last post, I mentioned the sister of one of my best friends who just had brain surgery, and is dealing with a lot of complications with cancer. Things have been so crazy for their family lately, that it has been hard to catch a free moment from my friend to get caught up on how she's doing, other than to be told that it's not good and the doctors can really only try to keep her as comfortable as possible from this point on. She came home from the hospital on Friday, almost two weeks after her last surgery.
As always, my prayers are with her, but now even more pressing is the condition of my friend, Jon. Jon had a heart condition as a child that had him in and out of doctors' offices and on life-long medication. This experience inspired him to enroll in a two-year program to become a pediatric echo-tech and work with other children with heart conditions after our beloved radio station was sold. However, with the return of his sister's cancer, he put that on the back burner to concentrate on helping with his niece and nephews. His family is incredibly close... His mom raised him and his sister on her own since Jon was a toddler, and he has really been their rock through all of the turmoil surrounding Angela's battle... which has left him, understandably, extremely stressed.
I was supposed to see Jon on Friday night for a VeggieTales event, but received a call from him that afternoon telling me that he wasn't going to be able to make the drive up because his back and shoulder had been bothering him, and also because Angela was coming home from the hospital that day. On Saturday I received a text from him asking me to design a poster for the band I have been working with, and for which he is the drummer/acting manager (Chad James)... I texted back that I could work on it on Sunday if he e-mailed me the specs. I never received an e-mail, but figured it was just "Jon being Jon" and spacing because he had so much else on his plate. Then, while baby-sitting on Monday morning, I received a call from the lead singer, Chad, and figured he was calling to ask about the poster, so I didn't listen to the voicemail until I was done babysitting later in the afternoon. I was shocked and saddened to hear that Jon had suffered a massive heart attack on Sunday afternoon!
From what I have learned, he was driving alone when it happened, and either went off the road, or pulled over. Someone passing by stopped, found him unconscious, and called 911. The doctors are not sure how much time passed before he was found, but they are estimating his brain was without oxygen for around 30 minutes. An initial brain scan was quite bleak, and doctors thought he may have also had a stroke. Fortunately, further tests showed that he did not also have a stroke, but they were keeping him on a ventilator in a drug-induced coma and were lowering his body temperature to 90°F. Yesterday, his condition was so critical that they were concerned that he wouldn't make it, or if he did, that he would have a very diminished quality of life... this as his sister is fighting cancer and he and his wife haven't even reached their one year anniversary...
Today, they started to bring him out of the coma, initially very gradually, so that they can do another brain scan tomorrow and hopefully receive some better results. As of this afternoon, he is off the ventilator, awake, and talking (only a little, which is very unlike Jon :) but he's pretty confused and is having trouble with his memory... he knows who people are, but if they leave the room for a while and come back, he won't remember that they were already there... Still, this is amazing progress given that only yesterday they were not sure he'd make it! Things are still touchy, but the fear that he won't make it has near dissolved, and they are now concentrating on getting him better and preserving a much quality of life as they can... as close to "normal" as possible...
This, to me, is so blatantly miraculous! Nothing, no amount of medical science could cause such a quick, however seemlingly small, turnaround in such a short amount of time except for God and all the prayers that have already been sent up on his behalf. He is still in the ICU in IL, and it looks to be a slow road to regaining his strength, so his family does not want a lot of friends making the trip down and tiring him out. Right now, what they really need is continual prayer. The whole Hemmer family has a strong collective faith in God, and I know that now, when they feel like they've just had the rug ripped out from under them, they will lean on him for strength, so please keep them in your prayers.
