In Memory of Susanne

It was in the early 1970s when Susanne earned her nursing degree from Brevard Community College. She was following in her mother’s footsteps by becoming a nurse and helping care for others. She began her career with Wuesthoff Hospital in Rockledge and later worked at Health First Cape Canaveral Hospital. Throughout her career, she did it all, from serving as an emergency room (ER) nurse, surgical nurse, orthopedic nurse, case manager, and department head of surgery.

We were married on June 2nd, 1973. In 1978, we moved to Marietta, Ohio, the first settlement in the Northeast Territory. It was a small, quaint town with a population of approximately 40,000.

She loved it there, and we ended up staying another 20 years before returning home to Florida. While we were in Ohio, Susanne worked at the local hospitals and at an orthopedic surgeon’s office, while also earning her Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) degree from Morgantown University in West Virginia.

We once attended one of my employer’s company picnics, and she won a cast-iron frying pan for throwing it the farthest. Those things are heavy.

Returning home to Florida in late 1998, we settled in Suntree, a short distance from Rockledge, FL. Susanne returned to Health First Holmes Regional Medical Center, where she worked until her disability in 2016 required her to retire.

In the early 2000s, she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS). We faced a few setbacks with MS, but she stayed in the game and never gave up.

In 2018, our world came crashing down. She began experiencing numbness in her hands. We went back to her previous surgeon, who said she needed a cervical fusion. Dr. Basil Theodotou performed the surgery in late August 2018 at Holmes Regional Medical Center. Over the next four or five weeks, I had to keep taking her back to the hospital because of ongoing pain.

During her last hospitalization, Dr. Theodotou diagnosed her with hydrocephalus after withdrawing cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) from the surgical incision site. At the same time, he told me that he was going out of town for the next five days, but she would be fine. Throughout all of this, I had been trying to get her transferred to a higher-level tertiary care hospital. We finally received the approval to transfer her to the University of Florida Shands Hospital in Gainesville, FL.

We were packing up to go to Gainesville, but when Susanne did not answer her phone that morning, I knew something was wrong. We drove down to the hospital, where I found Susanne unresponsive and most likely already in a coma.

They did a stat MRI and held a private consultation with the on-call surgeon, who said she needed emergency surgery or she would die. The surgery was performed that evening, and she came out of it on life support. After two days, they were able to take her off life support and finally transfer her to UF Health Shands Hospital.

Susanne spent two weeks in Gainesville trying to stabilize, but nothing worked, and they finally placed a ventriculoperitoneal (VP) shunt. We stayed with her the entire time.

We returned home in mid–October, but Susie had to spend several weeks in a rehabilitation hospital before coming home. We took our RV down to Palm Bay and parked it in the rehab hospital’s parking lot so we could stay close to her.

She went through months of outpatient physical therapy (PT) after that, but we knew that she would never be the same again. If you did not know she had spent more than 40 years in nursing, you might not have made the connection. Susanne had been left with an undetermined amount of brain damage. It was very hard to watch, knowing there was nothing that we could do to help her.

On the night of February 23, 2025, our good Lord came and took her home. She devoted her life to helping others and was, by all accounts, an angel on earth! She is now at peace and no longer in pain. She is terribly missed!

If only we had known about hydrocephalus and the resources available earlier, it is very possible that Susanne’s story may have had a different ending. To my wife, I am deeply sorry, my Love!!

Husband
Bill
PS: Until The 12th Of Never!!

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