How It All Started

On July 22, 2008, Michael was rushed to the emergency room at Joe DiMaggio’s Children’s Hospital. He arrived at the hospital awake, alert and talkative. Mom, Dad, Michael and a team of doctors were in the ER. About 10 minutes after arriving, Michael started having difficulty breathing. They first put him on oxygen, then used a mask which had continuous flow, then everything got worse. They had to sedate Michael and put in a breathing tube. He was now unconscious and on a ventilator. His blood pressure was dropping and they put him on numerous medications to keep it up. He swelled up, with fluid leaking from his capillaries. He was moved to the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit. He looked like a different person.

On July 23rd, the doctors suggested that his brothers visit him and to make arrangements. We were losing Michael. But, the doctors never gave up, staying by his side for almost 36 hours, tweaking medications and the ventilator. Things were still critical and we were advised that continuous dialysis might help, but that there was not much else medicine could do for Michael. It was up to Michael to fight.

We waited and watched the numerous monitors showing pulse, blood pressure, saturation rate, etc. Sleeping was not an option. Our close friends were receiving hundreds of calls asking about Michael and asking if they could relay information. We then discovered a wonderful service available at the hospital called Care Pages. Family members of patients can post updates on the Care Pages website and Care Pages would forward an email alert to all who signed up that a new post had been made. We began posting and our friends began circulating the information about signing up to receive the post alerts. We spent the next 51 days writing posts and reading the wonderful messages of support from all those who visited the site. We counted over 10,000 visits to Michael’s Care Page and almost 1,500 messages were sent to us. If you are interested, the posts by our family (Mom, Dad, Michael and his brothers) are set forth below in chronological order or you can go to Michael’s Care Page to read the posts and the messages of support at http://www.carepages.com , search for Michael’s page by typing in “michaelstolzy”