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Grief changes everything
Grief changes everything….
It was August 5th 2001 around 2 am when I watched Jessica take her last breath. Jessica had been in hospice care for about 2 or 3 weeks and we knew that the end was near. I held her hand and watched her leave this earth.
Fourteen months previous to her passing we took Jessica to MUSC children's hospital to have emergency surgery. At that time we were living in Bluffton SC and I was working for a law firm there. Jessica was riding her bicycle one day and she fell off of it and broke her glasses. Turns out that was the beginning of the end.
While we saved up for replacement glasses for Jessica she started having other symptoms such as constant headaches, nausea and vomiting. When all of that added up I realized we needed to take her to the ER on Hilton Head Island. After they took a cat scan of her head they found what appeared to be a baseball sized mass in her head near the brain stem. We were encouraged to have her transported to MUSC children's hospital via ambulance.
This was around 11 pm that night I think. Specific times and dates are fuzzy at this point. We loaded up our other two children and followed the ambulance to Charleston SC where they did emergency surgery at MUSC’s Childrens hospital. Once the surgery was done the surgeons said they got as much as they could but since it was located…