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May angels lead you into Paradise;
may the martyrs receive you at your coming
and lead you to the holy city
of Jerusalem.
May a choir of angels receive you,
and with Lazarus,
who once was poor,
may you have eternal rest.
Posted on 04/10/2019 10:54:28 AM PDT by Tired of Taxes
Shortly before undergoing surgery so that he could donate bone marrow to a 14-year-old boy in France, Derrick Nelson, a high school principal in Westfield, N.J., granted an interview to a student journalist.
“If it’s just a little bit of pain for a little bit of time that can give someone years of joy,” he told her, “it’s all worth it.”
In October, an organization that connects people suffering from life-threatening diseases with potential bone marrow donors had contacted the principal after he showed up as a potential match for the French patient. When follow-up testing confirmed the match, the 44-year-old educator readily agreed to donate his stem cells in hopes that it would save the life of a stranger. Tragically, it ended up being the last thing that he ever did.
On Monday, school officials announced that Nelson, who had been on medical leave since the February procedure, had died over the weekend. Family members told NJ.com that he had lapsed into a coma after the surgery and never recovered.
"After the procedure he did, he couldn’t speak and was lying in the bed,” his father, Willie Nelson, 81, told the site. “His eyes were open and he realized who we were. But he couldn’t move. He never spoke again.” The exact cause of his son’s death on Sunday remains unknown, the elder Nelson added. “We really don’t know the full story of what happened,” he told NJ.com. “We were expecting him to come out of the coma he was in. But he didn’t make it.”
In his February interview with the student newspaper, Nelson referenced multiple health issues that made his plan to donate stem cells to the teenager more complicated.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
That we should all be so kind.
RIP, Derrick Nelson.
I have a morbid fear of general anesthesia.
I would opt for spinal or local, if possible.
Very sad. He sounds like an all around good man - military service, very respected and admired in his community and professionally, and obviously with a very kind heart.
Any kind of surgery is dangerous, especially the anesthesia, although it sounds as if maybe the hospital should have checked for the sickle cell factor (even though it may have had nothing to do with his death) earlier.
In any case, a brave and good man. Memory eternal.
No good deed goes unpunished.
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Thanks...I have to go under next week(for @10 min)..for cataract surgery...
Amen.
A wonderful thing for your son to do. :-) Yes, most people do fine after this procedure.
It just saddens me when someone does something wonderful, but it turns out this way.
Ask them if it is general or topical anesthesia...
What’s “topical?” my understanding is I get IV so they can give me a shot under my eye (my cataract was trauma caused)
My late father in law a Physician / Surgeon always said “the anesthesiologist is the most important person in the operating room”.
Not long ago, a close family member had cataract surgery in both eyes. Twilight anesthesia. It’s like traveling through a time portal: you sit down, and the next thing you know, the doctor is saying it’s over. (At least that’s what I’ve been told.)
As my father (a doctor) used to say: You don’t pay the anesthesiologist to put you to sleep, you pay him to wake you up.
Was theirs for a trauma caused cataract? Did they have to have a shot under the eye? (Not the normal shot as I understand it.)
I don’t think trauma was involved. But the cataracts led to almost-complete blindness in one eye. Now both eyes have 20/20 vision.
You mentioned an IV above... It sounds as if the doctor will give you “twilight anesthesia” so that you’re completely relaxed. The doc is going to want you relaxed and calm and probably will sedate you before any shot under the eye. Of course, check with your doctor’s office to be sure.
My family member felt very relaxed by the sedation and didn’t feel a thing, and it was over very quickly both times.
Even though patients are “awake” for cataract surgery, most say they don’t remember anything.
Have you ever had twilight sedation? It was given to me a few times for other types of procedures (not cataracts). In those procedures, though, I was fully conscious and aware of every single detail. But I was so relaxed by the sedation that I was calm and happy. And didn’t feel a thing.
It’s still around, but unusual diseases/disorders like that seem to go into and out of vogue with regard to public and media attention to them. Medicine is a lot better at managing a wide range of medical conditions than it was 40 years ago, and I think that once medical treatment progresses for a disorder is “potentially deadly” to simply being “a chronic pain in the ass” people that have it stop mentioning it, and the media gets bored with it... at least until some vapid celebrity has the disease/condition, then suddenly it’s everywhere again.
Oh, and I should note that public perception and media attention aren’t always accurate either. I have narcolepsy, I was diagnosed about a year and a half ago, I’ve likely had it since I was a teenager (20+ years), but based on all the media exposure it received during the ‘90s (usually in stupid comedies and daytime talk shows, which I don’t expect a lot of freepers to expose themselves to), I would never have guessed that I have it because I thought it was all about people falling asleep at random moments. Usually in ‘90s comedies these people would appear full of energy one moment, and fall asleep in mid conversation, or in a bowl of spaghetti or something like that the very next moment. But in the real world, It’s really about being miserably tired all the time because you don’t really get any rest even when you are asleep. Only a small percentage of narcoleptics (appear to) randomly fall asleep, and even then, they weren’t exactly bouncing off the walls moments before.
What you say is true about certain diseases. There may be a flurry of attention about it for a while, then the wave subsides, when the disease can be controlled to some degree.
Aids is like that now. Diabetes too.
I was never diagnosed with narcolepsy, but probably had it.
The symptoms were not treated directly until I got help for asthma. I’m surprised I wasn’t fired back then for dozing off on the job. At that time, I was a teacher’s aide disabled students. To be honest, some of the classes were so boring I had to fight to stay awake.
Narcolepsy is quite literally caused by ‘brain damage’ which caused by the immune system attacking cells in the hypothalamus which controls the sleep cycle. It is incurable. Unless, you’re having some really strange symptoms like suddenly (and temporarily) losing muscle strength, or having hallucinations (some narcoleptics can be both asleep and awake at the same time, which allows dreams to intrude on reality), then you probably have/had something more mundane like sleep apnea.
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