After a lot of testing, doctors couldn’t figure out why Eloise Barnette, 75, became unresponsive last October.
Her husband found her on their bed and wasn’t able to wake her up. She was rushed to Mount Carmel West hospital in Colombus, Ohio, where doctors put a breathing tube down her throat to keep her alive.
Barnette was on a ventilator for two weeks. Her blood pressure dropped, which caused her kidneys to fail. She had to be put on dialysis, a treatment that replaces the filtering function of the kidneys when they no longer work.
The family had lost hope and were reportedly starting to plan her funeral.
“Her family thought she wouldn’t want all of this aggressive treatment, so they decided to remove the breathing tube and make her more comfortable,” Dr. Matt Wooten of Mount Carmel West hospital told Global News.
Wooten told the family that three things could potentially happen once she was taken off life support. Barnette would either die in a couple of minutes or in the matter of days. Or in very rare circumstances, she could live.
“We all thought she wasn’t going to make it when we took off her breathing tube,” Wooten said.
But in the hope of ending Barnette’s suffering, the family decided to pull the plug on Nov. 8.
“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” Wooten told Global News. Barnette kept on breathing on her own and became responsive again.
After two days, Wooten went down to palliative care to see how Barnette was doing.
“When I went down there, she opened her eyes and started talking to me,” he said. “It really surprised me.”
Barnette had to go through weeks of rehab after she was released from hospital.
“They didn’t see any chance of me coming out of this and they thought it would be best to just let me go,” Barnette told NBC4. “I have a lot of fight in me and it keeps me going.”
Until this day, Wooten said there is still no clear diagnosis for Barnette. They ruled out stroke and meningitis.
“The only definitive thing we could come up with is ventriculitis,” Wooten said. He describes it as a life-threatening infection that inflames the ventricles in the brain responsible for circulating spinal fluid.
Today, Wooten said Barnette is at home and fully recovered. He calls it a miracle. “I believe we have all the fancy equipment and technology, but at the end of the day we don’t have control of someone’s life,” Wooten said.
One thing is for sure, Barnette told NBC4 that this near-death experience really got her thinking.
“It makes you stop and rethink your life,” she said. “I think life is too short to worry about things because worry is not going to solve anything. I’m going to live. That’s what I want to do.”
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