Scary stuff!
Last weekend Billy Ray Cyrus tweeted a photo of his son Braison in the hospital hooked up to all kinds of wires and holding a container filled with blood. It was gross and pretty scary. Billy Ray's only explanation was:
This was yesterday. Everything is O K now and he is home...but @braisonwukong was bleeding badly ! yfrog.com/oeu93ewj
Braison had mentioned on his own Twitter that he had tonsil surgery earlier in the week and then ended up bleeding a lot which sent him to the hospital.
Now Tish, Billy Ray's wife and mother to Braison, Miley, and the rest of the bunch, has explained just what went down.
"After five kids I have seen it all," she told me this afternoon in an interview near her L.A. home. "But I had never seen anything like this. It was just crazy."
"They did it in a surgery center and released him. The doctor said everything went great and sent us home. Just a normal thing, eating ice cream, soup, relaxing. He was doing okay. And then on the seventh day after surgery he had some bleeding. It scared him but it wasn't a lot. I called the doctor and spoke to a nurse. They said it was totally normal, just scabs coming off and there will be some bleeding, and said don't panic. But if there is a steady stream of blood that is not normal."
"Then on day nine he woke himself up because he felt something running down his throat. He sat up and started spewing blood out of his mouth. As soon as he came to me I immediately put him in the car. We live three miles from the hospital, luckily. I got in there and you could see the nurses and doctors in the emergency room were alarmed. They started doing everything they could to get the bleeding stopped. The blood was just pouring out of his mouth," said Tish. "He was choking on his own blood! It was so traumatizing. You think a tonsillectomy is no big deal! But it was full-blown hemorrhaging. They took him back into operating room and stitched up the bleeding artery."
Whew. My kids have come to me with injuries that were bleeding profusely that just about scared the crap out of me -- can't imagine if that blood had been coming from their mouths. I probably would have really come unglued.
Tish goes on to give other families a warning.
She cautions, "People need to take a tonsillectomy seriously. It can be life threatening. People really need to be aware of the complications and that fatalities do happen. There is no way he could have kept losing that amount of blood and survived. We are lucky we were a few miles from the hospital and I could get him there. If we were in Nashville it would have taken us 25 minutes to get there and it could have been the difference between life and death."
Wow, what an ordeal. Glad Braison came through it okay.
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