Positivity: “Miracle Lady” Survives Three Brushes with Death
Carol Strande is amazingly none the worse for wear (HT Good News Blog):
The Miracle Lady
We never really know how strong our survival instinct is until confronted with a life or death situation. But a Volga, South Dakota woman has looked death square in the eye on more than one occasion and lived to tell about it. Still, the challenges keep coming.
When we first heard about Carol Strande, we were told she’s nothing short of a miracle: how she’s nearly died at least three times in the last few years but has overcome it all and us up and around and vibrant as ever.
So we were somewhat surprised when we arrived at her home in Volga to find her looking rather frail, confined to a recliner. It turns out that a week before our visit, she’d fallen and broken her pelvis…the latest setback she and her husband, Lyle, will have to overcome.
Carol Strande says “And I was riding my bike for 30 minutes a day and doing all my exercises and doing famously until I fell.”
The Strandes should be getting used to it by now. There was her brain aneurysm in 2000.
“Oh that was real close,” she says. “He stayed in Sioux Falls in a motel for a month.”
Then last July while she and husband, Lyle were in California to see their daughter. Carol suffered a massive heart attack. That was followed by successful bypass surgery. But then, she developed life threatening respiratory problems.
After two weeks in a California intensive care unit, the decision was made to fly her to Sioux Falls where she had a tracheotomy and was put on a ventilator. Days turned into weeks with little or no improvement. It seemed certain that this time, Carol Strande was going to die. “There were many times I prayed that I would because I felt so helpless,” she says.
And there was more bad news. “When they released her from Select, the prognosis was she would never get off the ventilator,” husband Lyle says.
To make matters worse, Lyle was told there was no place in South Dakota that could provide long term care for someone on a ventilator. But Lyle is as stubborn as his wife and managed on his own to get Covington Heights Health Center in Sioux Falls to accept her.
Still she was getting nowhere until respiratory therapists from Avera McKennan were called. “And they came over and that’s when the ball started to roll. From then on, things happened because they really worked with her,” Lyle says.
In fact, in less than a month, the ventilator was removed, the trach came out and Carol was home for Christmas grateful for all the prayers on her behalf. “I know that helped and I’m just a damn stubborn Norwegian and I know that helped. I wasn’t going to give up,” she says.
Carol Strande’s trials and tribulations have brought her family closer together. Daughter Rae has moved back from California. “And I just thought it was time for the oldest kid to step up to the plate and come home and help take care of my mom,” Rae Strande says.
Carol is already anxious to put down the needle point and crocheting and get back on the exercise bike. “Well, I don’t feel like a miracle lady sitting here with a busted hip.”
“She’s doing good. She’s doing good.” Lyle says. Her many cancelled dates with the grim reaper has led to a new nickname for this feisty Norwegian.
“My daughter is calling me kitty because she says I’ve got at least nine lives and I’ve used up quite a few of them already.”
