Wasted Trails 4x4 magazine April 2014 Vol 11 | Page 16

Free 1 Year Anniversary Special Edition At the age of 19 Justin was diagnosed with Crohns Disease. He nearly lost his life because of it and since then started Crawlin For Crohns. Its sole purpose is to raise money and awareness for Crohns Disease Research! My Crohns Story Justin Hall: His battle with Crohns. I was in the hospital for twenty-six days (16 in Intensive Care Unit (ICU) and 10 in Critical Care Unit (CCU)). I was diagnosed with Crohn‘s Disease, it is a disease that attacks your intestines. The disease ate a hole in my intestine and leaked infection that ate a hole in my pelvis, hip, and lower spine and caused a sever bone infection. I had to go into emergency surgery on the 30th of September to have five inches of my insestine removed and to have as much of the infection cleaned out as the doctors could get too. At 9:40pm I went into surgery and came out at 1:45am. I woke up at about 8 somethin in the morning with a tube down my throught, and I couldn’t breathe with it there, and my arms were tied to the bed. Some doctor came in told me to cough, and he yanked the tube out of me. I also had a urinary catheter, I couldn’t even feel when I was going to the bathroom. I looked down at my side and I had a JP tube in my side. I felt my neck because it was hard to move and I had a pick line in my neck, so the nurses could give me meds, on top of what i was getting in my 4-8 different IVs in my arms. I also had an epidural in my back, and it was suppose to make me feel no pain. it didn’t work, for hours I sat there pretty much screaming and crying in pain. and finally the docs came and removed it and put me on the strongest pain meds available, dilaudid. I had probably over a dozen different IVs in my arms. after the severe pain I was in, I went into SVT which is Supra Ventricular Tachycardia, where my heart went from 100 beats per min to 250 beats per min in a matter of seconds. It felt like my heart was going to burst out of my chest. All I remember was asking my mom to feel my chest and than all the alarms in ICU went off, and every nurse and doc came running. They did a lot of different things to get my heart to slow down, but nothing worked. So they choose to inject me with something that would stop my heart and restart it to make it slow down. well that didn’t work the first time, so they did it a second time. and that finally worked. I honestly know what it is like to have your heart stop, everything was going in slow motion it felt like, I was grasping for air cause I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t move, nothing seemed to happen when I tried to talk, everything started to fade away, everything started going dark, I honestly felt like I was dead, and than my heart started beating again, that happened twice. I had to have a blood transfusion a couple h