For those of you who don’t know it’s been quite a journey for about a year now.  Every five years Medicaid will purchase a new hospital bed for those who need it. I have qualified for decades and never had an issue with getting a low air loss mattress that is needed to prevent bedsores, since I am very susceptible for them to occur. Having had a loss of appetite and not eating much led to developing stage four bedsores. They sent a hospital bed out which was later denied by Medicaid, so they picked up the denied mattress and ended up giving me one that was inadequate. Due to that, I developed another bedsore. So we appealed the denial and were unsuccessful at the time. Eventually through Gods grace and my brothers colleagues and a state representative they worked with FSSA to get me the proper hospital bed. But not having it from the start lead to 7 bed sores. 1 sore(ulcer)on the upper left back of my shoulder. A sore on each hip that were so deep, both of my hip bones were exposed. A sore on each buttocks that you couldn’t see where it ended. I also developed a sore on my tailbone where the tailbone was visible. With these sores, I have been hospitalized multiple times with severe bone infection that caused me to be put on very heavy antibiotics. Over a year ago, I started going to St Vincent wound care were we weren’t seeing much improvement only visiting the wound clinic every two weeks. With the severity of the wounds,  I should have been going 2-3 times a week. After a few appointments, the Monday before Thanksgiving we showed up for our appointment to be told “you need to go to the ER” I said OK are you talking about today they said yes right now we will get a bed open for you. I was accustomed, to long stays at hospitals so I told them we are going to go to Community North. Unfortunately, that Thursday before, my mom had went to the hospital due to a fall. She had so many brain bleeds, there was nothing the Dr’s could do. Many years back she had a stroke and was diagnosed with a rare brain disease that caused bleeding on the brain. While we were there,  the Lord decided to call my mom home. The funeral service was going to be Friday keep in mind I was still in hospital. I should not have been discharged but there was no way I was going to miss my mothers funeral. While I was there for 2 weeks, I had both hips, the wounds in my buttocks, and my shoulder debrided, and had a wound on my back sewn shut.  We weren’t given much advice for healing besides doing wet to dry bandaging. We were pretty much stuck in the dark, but had a follow up with the plastic surgeon. Needless to say we didn’t feel comfortable with him because after he checked the wounds, he said, so what do you want to do? I said “I don’t know you are the doctor.“ Needless to say we dropped him. I was also under the impression that they didn’t have an inpatient wound clinic, which they did, but it was never mentioned to us. So the next step was to try to get in with IU wound clinic but they weren’t taking any Medicaid patients at the time. In the meantime my wife is a rockstar was changing all of the bandages. Through our church, we linked up with a woman (our saving grace) who worked as an inpatient wound therapist down at Methodist IU wound clinic. We were able to get it to about a month of appointments at the IU wound center, but one night the infection was just to much, and I started having some pretty bad hallucinations, due to that, and bloodwork, I was admitted to Methodist. Fast forward to May when I was finally able to have my plastic surgery on the wounds which would have us in the hospital for an expected weeks time. It ended up being a two week stay. One night my blood pressure had dropped really low and I could tell something wasn’t right. In a matter of minutes what look like a scene from the show ER my room was flooded with doctors and nurses trying to figure out what was going on. Later on that night I was admitted to to the ICU for constant observation.  A few days later I started having really bad reactions. I was having issues with my sight, and my eyes were extremely sensitive to were I couldn’t stand light. My ears were so sensitive I could hear the smallest sound. That was extremely painful! I was also in excruciating pain from head to toe. Come to find out, they were under dosing my epilepsy medicine by 100mg for about a week. Years back my doctor said if I was ever to go off the medicine that I would have to wean off of it very slowly. So we think that I was going through withdrawal. While we were there, the individual that helped us out did my bandage change. Well one day she was changing my bandages and told me and my dad  that she wasn’t going to sugarcoat. But the night she came out to our house to help out, she got back in the car and told her husband she didn’t know if I would make it. She said that because my wounds were so severe. She said I was a miracle and did a hallelujah dance. Meanwhile we still did not have the proper mattress at home and we’re worried about being discharged to go back home to a inadequate hospital mattress, especially since it was required for me to be bed ridden for six weeks. Well the Lord, worked everything out to where the day I was discharged a company had come to the house and set up the proper mattress,  praise God! After being discharged from the hospital, we have continued to go to the outpatient IU Wound Care clinic. Will doing outpatient for the wounds my therapist told me that people with the same severity of bedsores took years to heal as fast and as well as I have! They said my nutrition had gotten better which is true but we know where that came from. Well, I had healed up pretty nicely and starting getting up in my wheelchair. Well, I tried to run before crawling and was spending too much time in the chair, causing pressure on my bed sores and so they opened up. Since then I have had to have some of the wounds debrided because of bad flesh. Now that the wounds are healing, we are moving on to the next thing that needs attention which is my femur.  Due to a bad transfer from one of the aids my femur bone was fractured. If not for hearing the plastic surgeon say I had a fractured femur, we would have never known.  The only thing we were concerned was that my left leg was considerably shorter than my right leg by about 4-6 inches. So we did an x-ray and it turned out that my femur bone was jammed up into my pelvis. Initially, I was told that it would have to be rebroken, but there was a possibility It wouldn’t heal correctly and it would have to be amputated. Well, we decided to get a second opinion from a good family friend that had done my mothers double hip replacement surgery. He looked at the x-ray and it was a little out of his expertise. He said he was fine with just doing regular old replacement surgeries. Well he sent my x-ray to a few of his colleagues to see whether or not they could do the surgery. He referred us to a trauma orthopedic surgeon that could do the surgery. We met with the trauma orthopedic surgeon, he was very nice and said that he could take care of my hip. He said he would team up with a plastic surgeon and do the surgery.