OSMOND — On Friday, Nov. 1 Osmond Community School fifth grade parents and students held a fundraiser for classmate Hunter Marsh, the son of Alexis Marsh and Aaron Rucker. Parents and some school staff members donated baked goods to be sold at the bake sale that was held after school in the lunchroom and in front of Tiger Town Food Center. The fifth grade students helped make posters, carry baked goods, and set up the lunchroom. The bake sale was a great success, nearly selling out of everything!
According to his mother, Hunter had a brain bleed from an AVM (arteriovenous malformation) that the doctors had to do open brain surgery to repair and remove. He was on the ventilator for a few days and in a medically induced coma.
Alexis explained what happened with Hunter: “He woke up last Saturday, feeling nauseous before 4 a.m. as I was leaving for work. By midday he was complaining of his ear hurting. When I got home about 5 p.m., we went to leave the house and he started complaining of his neck hurting so we continued to the ER and he just continued to complain about all the aches and pains and his back hurting. He checked out for no ear infection and no flu.
“They did a CT of his abdomen
and his appendix was fine, so we couldn't figure out why his back hurt and his neck hurt along with his head and everything else. Nathan at Children’s thought it could be meningitis, and Plainview doesn’t have the ability to test for meningitis, so they Life-flighted him to Children's where they completed a head CT and found the brain bleed.
“Children’s didn’t have the abil- ity to do an angiogram to find out what was causing the bleed, so he was transferred to UNMC by ambulance where he was admitted to the PICU. He started having a change of speech and increased pain so they were worried it was getting worse and they intubated at about 6:30 a.m. on Sunday.
“By 7:30 a.m. he was in the procedure room for the angiogram and from there we went into surgery where they cut his scalp open and removed the chunk of his brain with the AVM before adding a drain tube for pressure monitoring. Then they kept him in a medically induced coma on the ventilator for 72 hours.
“They removed the paralytics and tried to wake him up with the ventilator still in place, but he was too agitated and they had to treat with a paralytic pain and an anti-anxiety so that he didn’t injure his incision or drain tube or get his breathing tube pulled out.
“He is now off the ventilator, needing some oxygen assistance and has pneumonia that he's fighting now, but he does know who we are and is able to move all extremities,” Alexis said. “As for recovery time, it could be two weeks, could be six months. It depends if he needs to go to Madonna for rehab. He may struggle to eat or drink or weakness with walking.”
As of Monday, Nov. 4,Alexis said Hunter is showing slow progress. He was scheduled for a swallow test on Tuesday to get the feeding tube removed if it is safe.
