Friday, September 6, 2024
Former Granbury Middle School principal, Andy Smith, has demonstrated remarkable progress in his recovery journey following an extensive stay in an intensive care unit.
Smith — who was admitted in early June due to severe pancreatitis — has been gradually regaining strength and responsiveness and has officially moved out of the ICU as of July 8, according to his wife, Mary Smith.
"He's been awake now for two weeks," Mary Smith told the Hood County News. “He's becoming more alert and he's getting stronger every day.”
She explained that her husband’s symptoms first began June 5, when he started experiencing severe nausea and abdominal discomfort.
“He was in such pain, and he was having a very hard time breathing, so that’s when we went to the emergency room,” Mary said. “They did a scan and discovered his pancreas was just really inflamed. They put him on oxygen and everything, but no matter what they did at the ER, it was not helping at all, so then they decided they needed to transfer him immediately by ambulance to the hospital so that he could get (seen by) a specialist.”
On June 6, he was admitted to Baylor Scott & White All Saints Medical Center in Fort Worth, where he was later diagnosed with necrotizing pancreatitis.
“It’s very, very painful,” Mary said. “It’s the pancreas trying to basically die.”
According to WebMD, necrotizing pancreatitis happens when the inflammation and damage from pancreatitis causes tissue in the pancreas to die — or necrotize. Necrotizing pancreatitis has a range of severity, but complications of necrosis are serious. Symptoms and treatment options will depend on how severe the necrosis is.
Once the diagnosis of necrotizing pancreatitis was confirmed June 8 — which coincidentally was the same day as Andy Smith’s birthday — he was immediately sedated, intubated, and placed on a ventilator to help him breathe.
“They just said with the pancreas that it’s just so very painful that they can’t control the pain no matter what they give him,” Mary Smith said. “They said the best way is to just let him rest to try to calm everything down.”
The hardest part, she said, is the fact that she was never given a concrete reason as to why his symptoms suddenly developed. She said he had no prior medical conditions and currently does not take any medication.
"There really just was no reason (why this could have happened),” she said. “And, you know, that's what's kind of the hard part about all this and figuring out why this could have happened so quickly.”
Andy remained sedated and on a ventilator for the following three weeks. Gradually, doctors began the process of awakening him, and subsequently replaced the ventilator with a tracheostomy tube.
Since Andy Smith has now been discharged from the ICU and moved into another room on a different floor at Baylor, Mary Smith said the next step is to remove the feeding tube and to work on his strength.
"He still has weeks to months of recovery, physical therapy, and speech therapy,” she said. “He'll probably actually be transferred to a rehab facility to get his strength back and to relearn how to talk. He can talk OK now with the tracheostomy in, but the plan is he won't have the tracheostomy forever, and so once they get that out, he has to learn to talk again with his normal voice. Even just learning to swallow again ... you don't realize when you're lying there for a month that you kind of lose everything.”
Andy Smith’s path to recovery has also been marked by the unwavering support of friends, colleagues, and members of the community who have all rallied behind him during this challenging time. As of Tuesday, July 9, a GoFundMe page has now raised $16,335 of the $40,000 goal.
"Everybody's been sharing it, which is so nice of them. I mean, complete strangers have shared it and have donated; it's just wonderful,” Mary Smith said. “I've shown it to him and I asked him, 'Do you know this person?' and sometimes he knows who they are ... but there are so many people whom he doesn't know. It's just friends of friends of friends.”
Even though Andy Smith submitted his resignation from his three-year stint at Granbury Middle School in December — with his contract officially ending in June — Mary Smith said he has gotten so much support from former students and colleagues.
"He just always loved every school he was at. He loved the teachers, the students, all the faculty,” Mary Smith said. “He's really going to miss being at a school, but I think with this happening, him not having to go back to work at a school actually will probably be the best thing for him. It's kind of odd that he didn't have another job lined up to be a principal at another school, because with all this going on, obviously, it probably wouldn't have worked, so it's kind of weird the timing that it happened."
Andy Smith’s plan following his resignation, Mary Smith said, was to expand their current Burleson business, Uptown Cheapskate, by adding a second location in Waco.
While the details of that plan are uncertain at the moment, Mary said the short-term goal is for her husband to get as much rest as possible so he can recover.
“The downside with the pancreas is you have to let it rest; that's all you can do,” she said. “It's not like a surgery or anything like that. It's just a lot of rest, meaning you can't hardly eat anything, because they don't want the pancreas having to do anything, basically, so it takes months of rest. Luckily, we've already had one month, so we're hoping the next month really shows that the pancreas is getting better, and the inflammation has gone down.”
The Smiths have been married 26 years and they have two children: Mason, 25, and Madison, 18.
To donate to Andy Smith’s care, visit gofundme.com/f/support-dr-andy-smiths-fight-in-icu; Cash App: Cash.app/$mary42177; or Venmo: Venmo.com/u/Mary-Smith-246.
“I'm just so glad we're finally on the road to recovery, because when they're lying there for weeks, you just have no idea what's coming,” Mary added. “I'm just so glad we turned the corner. He can smile and he can talk some, and he's aware that we're there. It's just so nice to be able to see that in him. We just appreciate all the help that we can get right now.”
