Comatose

Casey Hale gripped the steering wheel as she sped down the highway. Music streamed out of the car radio, but it did nothing to silence the thoughts racing in her mind.

Is Corey going to be OK? He has to be.

Casey drove for six hours straight from Arkansas, too worried about her older brother to even stop. Though she already knew that he was out of surgery and in a medically induced coma, 25-year-old Casey couldn’t help but fear the unknown.

 I need to see Corey. Will he wake up? How was this happening? Please God, let him be OK.

Her phone rang, bringing her back to reality. Another family friend was asking her for an update.  She answered countless phone calls from worried friends and family during the drive.

“I felt like it was probably one of the longest drives that I’ve ever made,” Casey said.

When Casey arrived, Corey was already in a coma in the ICU. The doctors needed to intubate him and figure out how to treat the infection.

“I remember being kind of in a state of shock,” Casey said. “I had just never seen my brother in that kind of condition. To me, he’s always been my big brother and he was so big and tough and strong, and he just looked so helpless.”

Casey was at her brother’s bedside when-ever she could. She told him jokes to try to get a reaction. She laid her phone on his pillow and played his favorite songs to drown out the beeping machines and whispering doctors, just in case Corey could hear them.

“I knew that my parents were really struggling and were really scared, so I tried to just stay upbeat,” Casey said. “If I talked to him, I tried to be real positive and just make the room a little bit lighter.”

Casey also sent daily updates to 85 people, who then passed them along to their friends and prayer groups. Though it was difficult, she tried to be uplifting.

“I wanted to have a positive every day so I tried to kind of keep that, but it was difficult to do because I was really scared,” Casey said.

When things got to be too much, Casey stepped out into the lobby and called her friends back home. She’d let go of her fear and grief and allow herself to cry.

On Sept. 2, Corey took a turn for the worst. His temperature rose to above 103 F and his breathing was labored. The doctors used countless ice packs and medicines to try and control his temperature, but they began to lose hope. They told Corey’s family to say their goodbyes.

“That was devastating,” Casey said. “My dad was really strong in that moment and just said, ‘This is not happening. We’re not going to lose him,’ but everybody was really, really scared.”

Casey refused to give up. She typed out an update.

“We are needing immediate prayer… we know that our Father is the ultimate physician,” Casey wrote. “He can do all things, and He doesn’t depend on modern medicine to do so. Please join me in praying for miraculous healing.”

Those 85 people sent out the urgent prayer request and hundreds of people from all over the country prayed, including his students and coworkers at Lewisville. Assistant principal Kyle Smith was a special education teacher at Lewisville at the time, and when he heard that Corey was having surgery, he expected him to be back to normal soon. Now, nobody knew if he would ever be able to teach another class.

“In the department down there, it kind of left a big hole,” Smith said. “You can’t believe that he’s not there. You go by his room or you go into his room and you expect to see him.”

On Sept. 3, his doctor decided on another surgery to find the infection. The waiting room was crowded as 25 people paced across the floor and prayed.

“I think it was a matter of a couple of hours, but it definitely felt like a lifetime,” Casey said. “Towards the end as we were waiting on the results from the surgery, it was really incredible to see the outreach that everybody poured out.”

At 8 p.m., their prayers were answered. A nurse called them from the operating room. They found the source of infection.

“I remember us just screaming and celebrating and high fiving,” Casey said. “The operating doors opened and the nursing staff came out that were with him, and they were giving each other high fives and jumping around. I think everybody knew how intense it was and how on the verge of losing him we all were.”