Gyla Lynn Darden

Female

Dudley, NC

United States

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About Me:

I am 42 years old, married with 2 children and one angel.

About my Loss:

My daughter was ill off and on for several months. We would take her to the emergency room and to her family doctor and they would always send her home saying it was an infection or gastroenteritis. One morning she woke up with a really bad headache and earache, so I took her once again to the emergency room. They sent her home with antibiotics and said she had an infection. 2 days later her fever was getting worse, and she started having abdominal pain in the upper right side. I took her back to the emergency room again and they did an ultrasound of her gall bladder which came back negative, and had to give her fluids by IV because she was dehydrated. They gave her what is called a GI cocktail and pain medicine which relieved it. So once again they sent her home. By Monday her temperature was 106.4 so I took her to her family doctor. She looked all the tests up on the computer that the hospital had done and said she didn't see anything abnormal. She decided to do a blood and urine culture (which takes 3 days to come back). She told be to alternate tylenol and motrin to help with her fever, and wait for the test results to come back. By the next day she was in and out of responsiveness. She was throwing up so hard that her face would turn purple and at times I thought that she would pass out. She had trouble walking because she was so weak, at times she would collapse. So I called the ambulance to take her to the hospital. They finally admitted her to the hospital that night. They gave her phenergan for the nausea which didn't work, she would still throw up. On Wednesday they did a CAT Scan and found that her spleen was enlarged and her gall bladder wall was thickened. The surgeon decided that this was where all of her trouble was coming from. He scheduled the surgery for the next day. After her surgery he spoke with us and told us that it was one of the toughest surgeries he had done. He said that her liver was so enlarged that it was wrapped around her gall bladder. (this was not mentioned with the initial consult after the consult). He told us that he had contimplated opening her up for the surgery, but decided against it, since it would leave a big scar on her and she was only 18 and didn't want to scar her up like that. He said that he say bile leaking from her liver, but was sure where, so he put a penrose drain in to monitor how much drainage. That evening she seemed to be better. She was talking on the phone and had an appetite again. She ate most of her supper. Around midnight she started running a temperature again and the vomiting started again. She was in severe pain, and her blood pressure was dropping. After five days of continuing to get worse, I finally requested she get sent to another hospital. They sent her to UNC Chapel Hill. The head surgeon spoke with us and told us that her bile duct had been severed in 3 different places and she was leaking bile in her abdomen. She was increasingly having trouble breathing and required more oxygen everyday. The surgeons there repaired what they could for the time and put in drains to drain the bile. Because of her lungs being injured from the bile they couldn't go in to repair the entire injury until she was better. A week after she was admitted to UNC she was on life support. Within 24 hours of being put on life support we were told that she needed to be put on ECMO (heart/lung bypass) of she wouldn't survive the night. We were told she only had a 50% chance of surviving the ECMO machine and that was if she survived being put on the ECMO machine. She was on ECMO for 5 days and put back on life support. At first it seemed to have helped a little. In the end she ended up with our Lord on July 23. She battled for her life for 37 days.

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