Update on Danae Netteberg

 I just read the latest update for Danae's mother who was in Chad to look after 4 grandchildren while Danae went to USA for a hysterectomy.  

Olen flew out of Bere and  will stop in France for more testing before going on to the states. 

Her dad will fly commercial.

Please prayer for the 4 older children left in Chad without mum or dad or grandma or grandpa.

Please keep Danae's mum in your prayers too as they think she has meningitis. 

Thank you. 

Olen and Danae are both Dr's in Chad and Danae's father is a Dr too but retired now. He has helped Danae on many surgeries in Bere. 

Danae and her mum, Dolores Bland, January 11th 2022 shortly after arriving in Chad this trip. 

Grandma and Grandpa Bland were in Bere to look after the children while Mummy was going to  having surgery in USA. 

The children before their dad and grandma fly off.

The latest I read ( about an hour ago)  is that they were still in the capital of Chad and hoping to get a different plane to Berlin. 

Danae is asking for many prayers for her whole family. 

Danae in USA with Baby Piper. 

Olen with Dolores Bland hopefully on their way to Germany now and Dolores' husband on a commercial flight I think still in France. 

The four older child, Zane, Lyol, Addison,  and Juniper.

Update: Written by Olen Netteburg

Well, I’ve slept about seven hours the last four days. I doubt my father-in-law has slept much more. He has always been tough. Trust me. Three years in northern Nigeria in the 60’s. Decades as the rural GP in America doing everything from hip replacement to appendectomy to cesareans. Rounding in multiple hospitals before and after running his office. Setting up a free clinic. Accepting non-currency payments from patients who couldn’t. Haying the fields and running a farm of 60 head of cattle single-handedly in the evenings after work, just because he grew up on a farm and didn’t know what else to do when he wasn’t working. (And being a vegan who raised cattle for the slaughter was a fact I always found amusing.) Traveling the world to work for free. Averaging over 1000 surgeries per year in Chad, Africa, from age 69-75. After two nights on the couch, we packed up his stuff off the bed so he could actually be on a proper mattress. I’d offered him mine the previous two nights, but he refused, insisting on the couch closest to my mother-in-law. Every night after he’d fall asleep I’d head home. Finally I got to see him fall asleep properly before I went home to clean and eat and get to some emails. 

Overnight we got a lot done. There’s a Canadian med evac company flying a patient to France as I write. Since they’ll be in the hemisphere, and since we have a friend of a friend, we will get her home for 120k. All the way to Fayetteville. Everything else was more than twice that, except for another friend who could limp her back in a tiny plane making eight stops along the way, with us being crew. His would spend at least 50k just to pay his own expenses. It’s been a million emails and texts and calls, from the US embassy to a dozen companies to a half a dozen friends in the industry to various country options to Docs willing to take her on their private service and treat her and house her for free to people praying and back again through the list. 

We had soft promises of billionaires’ private jets that then vanished. We had… it’s been a ride. 

Besides brief rides of pressers and oxygen, she’s been stable. At her best, she spontaneously opens her eyes and tracks, grunts and makes purposeful movements. At her worst, she’s a GCS of six. She has never closed her eyes at the command to close eyes. But she is not worse. She just went all night without pressers or oxygen. 

But the rollercoaster of her waxing and waning health, and the steeper rollercoaster of will we or won’t we evacuate and is this plane or that plane coming, are we going to France or America… that rollercoaster seems to be flattening out. Decisions are being made, but plans will still change, I’m sure. Her health isn’t guaranteed, but we’re encouraged. 

The jet only has room for one passenger, and the family is pushing that passenger should be me. My boss in America is also pushing me to be that person. But I’m not going to elbow my father-in-law out of the plane. There is minor discord. There will already be a physician on board, but people know me and don’t know him/her. I’m sure he/she is excellent, although my boss (who’s a physician) isn’t as sure. So we are offering to fly the physician home first class from Paris in exchange for having a second seat on the plane. Not sure if that’s allowed, but I’m licensed in America and willing to be the physician of record. I don’t know if that’s enough or if the industry has other regulations. Maybe if somebody here knows, they’d be willing to tell me if that would even be a remote possibility. I’d leave the kids here and fly back as soon as I land in the states. My kids are now 6-12 and they’re good kids. 

The plan is to have us fly up 10am Monday and they arrive 10am Monday, spend an hour on the runway getting situated and doing whatever we need to with emigration and leaving. Get to Fayetteville by Monday night, four stops later. 

Her health could still change for the worse. But she’s decidedly better now than she was 48 hours ago. 

Financially, Adventist Health International has decided to front the money and not ask anything from us. They were never our employer, but they manage our hospital and dozens more like it. They have been here many times and hold monthly board meetings. 100% of donations they receive labeled for “Béré” come to us. We’ve been together for over 11 years and my in-laws were here for six. They decided that money should not slow down the decision to evacuate from the first moment and offered to front it from the start. They have also decided the right thing is to not ask us to repay them. I’m sure this fiasco will end up personally costing us thousands here and there and add up, but that’s nothing compared to what it could have been and a minor contribution we are eager to make for the health and safety of our own mother. AHI hasn’t yet decided where funds can be reallocated from other projects, but they won’t come asking us to repay it. 

Thus far, true to form, even though I specifically asked y’all to wait and not donate until I figure out where money will come from, somebody found our old Venmo and started spreading it around, so I put it up for people to give. And true to form, you guys make me cry every dang time. There’s around $24,000 sitting in our PayPal and Venmo accounts we will be sending to AHI. That’s an amazing 20% of the evac bill from people who have never met me or my in-laws. Nobody here owes me anything and never has. 

For anybody who wants to help AHI replenish whatever other funds they had to tap into to cover this, they are an amazing organization we’ve personally donated tens of thousands to over the years, because we believe in them and what they do and we’re happy to make our meager contributions from what we earn. We’ve been giving to them years before we ever showed up here, even in medical school and residency, and if a medical student is donating to a place, that’s saying something. 

Ahiglobal.org/donate is where you can find them, and many of you have found them time and time again over the years. They take all manner of donation, including PayPal. Actually they also take donations of your time, in case you want to volunteer overseas. (And EVERYBODY processed here through AHI has evacuation insurance paid by AHI. Somehow we let this one slip and my in-laws didn’t come through AHI, they just showed up on their own. Lesson painfully learned.) If you want to mark your donation “Béré” in the memo line, it will come here. If you mark it “evac,” it can replenish the funds they used. There’s an email on the website you can email to ensure the donation goes where you like. 

I love you. You are my tribe. You are my encouragement. You are strength. I love you. Thank you for your words of encouragement. Thank you for your prayers. Thank you for your good thoughts. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you. I owe a cumulative debt to EM Docs that has built over years that is not financial and that I cannot ever begin to repay. Thank you for who you are. You will never know what you mean to me. I promise. You can’t. 

My mom died in 2017. And your words sustained me in a hard time. My children were going to die of rabies in 2017, and nobody will convince me you did not save their lives. My friend’s wife died in 2018 when I couldn’t be there physically for him. And you were there to hug whom I could not. When depression creeps in, you are there. When patients need advice my feeble mind can’t conjure, you save them. My mother-in-law is now my only mother. And I don’t know if she will be around tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after that. But I know you will be. And I’m comforted. 

I love you. Know that. 🥲

Edited to add: For those who find Venmo easier, AHI doesn’t do that. But you can send to @danae-netteburg (maybe need last four of phone number as 7790), and we will be happy to send it on.”

From Danae today... Friday, Feb 4th. 

It’s been exactly 2 weeks since I got Olen’s text. I had just brought my stuff in to my in laws’ house in PA as we had just drove in from Ohio where I had my preop appointment.

‘Your mom is not ok’

‘Define not ok’

‘Comatose’

We’ve gotten used to texting back and forth even with important and stressful information because that’s how we function with cruddy internet at times.

Olen worked nonstop with the team in Béré for days and days to assure the best care for my Mom. I would be on the phone the first day and mom would go apneic and I’d thought we would lose her when I’d here my father crying and the alarms beeping.

The last 2 weeks have been tortuous for all of us, but once mom got to Arkansas, it’s kind of settled down. It’s a miracle in itself that she made it from little tiny Béré across the whole WORLD to Arkansas. Thank you to all who made this happen! (That’s a whole other story).

Unfortunately settled down is not what we want. We want her to get up and respond! We want her brain to wake up. But that just hasn’t been happening. The 2 days before she flew, she was on room air and satting 99%, breathing on her own. Sadly, the flight doctor insisted that she be intubated for the travel, which isn’t completely unreasonable considering she came back Covid positive (even though what is making her very sick is bacterial meningitis). We knew if she was intubated, it would be next to impossible to extubate her given her lack of following commands.

We had family discussions of possibly flying DNR and not intubated (just so they would take her, believing she would make the flight not needing any interventions) versus intubating and full code. It was/is a rollercoaster.

So here we are 2 weeks out. She possibly asked for water before she left Béré but really wasn’t following any commands. Since being in the Covid icu in Arkansas she hasn’t shown any signs of following commands or knowing anything. And then we got word that she had to be isolated for a full 20 days since the Covid test (so looking at feb 13) with minimal interaction.

Bless everyone working in the Covid wards. The chaplain zoomed with us yesterday. It meant a lot. Today we were able to zoom again and spoke with her doctor and chaplain. Thank you to all of you who’ve been helping families come together with Covid.

And the good news that my dad already shared, is that she seems to be waking up a bit more today. She seems like she gave a thumbs up when asked. She is in restraints or she would pull out her breathing tube (a good sign that she wants it out).

I am a firm believer in miracles. I see them happen often in Béré. And I believe God is all loving and wants good things for everyone (not just those who people think deserve it). And I believe He does listen to our prayers as he did with Abraham. I’m also a realist in the medical world who sees a LOT of death and suffering. And God isn’t any lesser of a God when bad things happen. It just means we are living in a world of sin and sadness that will one day be perfect, but not yet. Today was nothing short of a small miracle that mom possibly followed a command.

Looking forward to more miracles, but today it was nice to have a thumbs up. Thank you to everyone who has said a small prayer to the Creator of all of us for my Mom. Keep ‘em coming.