Tim Vallier, 56, had the fight of his life last winter and he almost missed one of his family’s most precious moments.
He spent more than four months laid up in Vancouver General Hospital’s (VGH) intensive care unit, almost half of it in a coma.
“All I remember is waking up in a hospital bed in Vancouver in the middle of March with my wrists tied to my bed,” he said.
He went into Powell River General Hospital on January 9, 2012, with an abscessed jaw and the infection quickly spread. The next day he was flown down to VGH.
He couldn’t breathe without a respirator.
Looking at pictures of himself in the hospital, he described how he looked as “pretty grim.”
Tim lost almost 50 pounds from his average weight of 185. His daughter Cassandra was shocked to see how clearly his shin bones were defined.
Doctors performed two surgeries, first on his lungs and then on his heart to drain excess fluid that had built up due to the infection.
Multiple intravenous tubes for feeding and antibiotics were stuck in his arm and he had one tube in his body to help drain the fluid that would otherwise collect with nowhere to go. Doctors had him hooked up to a total of 18 tubes at one point.
“It was one step forward and two steps back for a while,” Tim recalled. “They’d take me off the respirator every so often to test me.”
Marina, Tim’s wife of 23 years, travelled back and forth to Vancouver countless times. “It was [a time] of worrying and questions for the doctors,” she said. “It got to be that I’d be there for three to five days and then come home and be here with [Cassandra] for a week and a half,” she said. “A friend of ours would drive me down and stay with me.”
Tim’s brothers and sisters also went down to spend time and to read to him to keep his mind active. The community rallied around the family to assist them with costs.
Marina phoned the hospital every day for updates from Tim’s nurses and doctors.
At the time, Cassandra was in grade 12 and wondered if her father would be there to watch her graduate from high school.
She works at Canadian Tire and said her employers were really supportive throughout the whole ordeal. She would have to take time off to go to visit her father, often with little or no notice.
“I had to grow up really fast,” said Cassandra. “It was a lot to take on at one time, having to go to school and prepare for grad.”
By last April Tim was able to breathe on his own, so his doctors transferred him back to Powell River. He spent another month in recovery.
“It was scary because I was wondering if I was going to be able to get out of the hospital to go to [Cassandra’s] grad,” said Tim.
Back in Powell River, he started walking with the help of a walker but he still couldn’t eat solid food.
Although happy about his improvement, Cassandra still worried that he wouldn’t be well enough to attend Brooks Secondary School’s Grand March held in Hap Parker Arena.
“I was wondering what was going to happen because everyone else would be dancing with their fathers and I’d be standing there,” she said.
Tim focussed on recovery and pushed himself to recover in time.
“When she asked me to dance, my eyes just lit up,” he said. “I was so proud.”
Although he recognizes a lot of what happened to him was beyond his control, he said the experience has made him “embrace life more and not take anything for granted.”
