Two days ago, on Saturday, Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown’s daughter was found face down in the bathtub in an eerily similar circumstance that led to her mother’s death nearly three years earlier. Bobbi Kristina was found by her husband and friend, she was not breathing.  CPR was started while 911 was called. When first responders arrived they continued CPR until Bobbi Kristina was brought to the hospital where she was placed on a ventilator and put into a drug induced coma to prevent further damage to her brain.

It doesn’t look good for Bobbi Kristina Brown though there are certainly enough people praying for her if you read any of the comment sections in articles about her. Celebrities are tweeting for a miracle and that is what she will need if she survives.

I know this because my mother suffered an anoxic brain injury when she was 29 years old. My mother did not drown, she suffered cardiac arrest while having a tracheotomy performed to allow her to breathe when pneumonia got the best of her lungs. She smoked and we had just moved to a high altitude so all told she didn’t have much of a chance either.

Most people don’t survive an anoxic brain injury. Anoxic means without oxygen. Our brains aren’t designed to be without oxygen for longer than a couple of minutes. Brain damage sets in at 4 minutes without oxygen and death occurs when the brain has been deprived of oxygen for 6 minutes.

My mother was without oxygen for 6 minutes. She was technically dead but because she was in an operating room surrounded by doctors they managed to bring her back to life. I suspect similar to what happened to Bobbi Kristina. She had not been breathing and had no pulse when she was discovered in the tub. She was placed on a ventilator when she arrived at the hospital.

So technically she is breathing, though it doesn’t sound as if she has regained consciousness or is able to breathe on her own.

My mother was in a coma for 6 weeks. When she finally awoke she didn’t know why she was in the hospital and she did not know who my brother and I were. She could barely speak, could not walk, could not talk and could not do any of the basic functions an adult needs to do to survive. She could not feed herself or toilet herself. She certainly couldn’t look after a couple of kids under the age of 6.

Like most people who survive an anoxic brain injury (and there aren’t many, most people die) my mother lost her short term memory. Imagine Dory from Finding Nemo, except not with such a sunny disposition. My mother did what she was told to do to recover,  initially, but eventually gave up any therapy that was helping her. She was not happy, she was depressed and angry and who could blame her?

I hope Bobbi Kristina is provided a miracle. At 21 she is too young to live a full lifespan with such severe injuries and handicaps. Her husband is too young to take care of her for the rest of her life. Thankfully she has no children as they would be, in essence, without a mother and would possibly have to do the care taking — like I did when I was 4 years old.

 

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