After a battle with a potentially deadly flu, Maple Ridge’s William Cassidy feels lucky to be alive, thankful to the staff at Ridge Meadows Hospital, and he wants to make sure everyone knows what a competent group work there.
“They really super nice people who are doing a helluva job, and they deserve some respect,” he said of the doctors, nurses, physiotherapists and other staff he credits for saving his life.
The 64-year-old’s ordeal began before Christmas. It saw his heart shocked numerous times, he was in a coma, then awake but unable to walk, and finally he’s bounced back.
He said his cold symptoms just got worse and worse, until his wis wife knew something was really wrong, and took him to Ridge Meadows Hospital emergency on Dec. 20.
“They didn’t like the look of me,” he recalled.
That first day staff used a defibrillator to shock his heart back into a regular heartbeat. It would be the first of six times they would use the defibrillator on him, he said.
He was in emergency for a day, and then taken to intensive care. He would be there for just over two weeks.
Cassidy is a diabetic, and doctors found that his heart was not his only problem – his pancreas was swollen to double its normal size. The organ regulates blood sugar and helps with digestion, and he wasn’t able to eat anything. He had a feeding tube, oxygen tube and a variety of intravenous drips.
He doesn’t remember weeks of his ordeal, because he was in an induced coma.
When he woke up, he said, he had an immediate appreciation that the people working around him had been keeping him alive.
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“They saved my life. It was quite emotional for my wife and kids to watch me deteriorate.”
Not eating or moving, the flesh melted from his frame, and he lost about 30 pounds.
“I used to have big, muscular legs. Now I have big, knobby knees,” he said.
But when he woke up, his worries were a lot larger than how he would look in shorts.
“I couldn’t even lift my legs out of the bed.”
Determined that he was going to get his health back, he got into a wheelchair, and went to work with the hospital occupational therapists twice a day.
By Jan. 16 they were able to send him home, with a four-wheel walker for support.
“I couldn’t have asked for a better team,” he said.
Cassidy’s family had Christmas presents and a celebration waiting for him.
“I wasn’t strong enough to pick up gifts and pass them out,” he said. “I couldn’t cut the turkey.”
His daughter works as a care aide, and would take him for walks. Her “just a little further” urging helped get him off the walker and onto walking poles he had kept from his hiking days.
Now he can walk back to the hospital unsupported.
He’s simply thankful, and somewhat philosophical.
“My wife said I never had much of a butt anyway.”
Cassidy needed follow-up tests to determine whether he was suffering from seizures, but fortunately tests came back negative.
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