Ontario ‘miracle’ woman wakes up from coma just days before her wedding
Sarah Kempinska spent two years planning her wedding but whether it would go ahead remained uncertain until the very week of the event, with the bride unconscious in a London, Ont., hospital.
Kempinska had routine surgeries to remove growths in her airways as part of treatment for Granulomatosis with polyangiitis, an autoimmune condition involving the immune system attacking small blood vessels in the body. In her case, it impacts her lungs and airway.
The surgeries, which are handled by her primary care team outside of London, typically see her discharged from hospital the very same day.
“I was not expecting a long recovery,” she explained, “but with this last surgery, you know, this is kind of a complicated disease and we didn’t really expect there to be this complication.”
Soon after the procedure, Kempinska could tell something wasn’t quite right. When she arrived back in London, she was struggling to breathe and ended up going to the emergency department at London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC) on May 23.
She was admitted for monitoring but when her breathing worsened, she was taken to the operating room and transferred to the critical care and trauma centre where she was intubated and placed in a medically-induced coma.
Her wedding, meanwhile, was supposed to be held June 3.
“I had all of the details meticulously laid out in spreadsheets and contact lists and payments for vendors all laid out. And I think it was all on my phone for the most part. So (my fiancé) Jim had to get a hold of that. And I was, of course, asleep in a coma,” she said.
“He actually used my fingerprint to get into my phone and get all of that stuff and make sure that he could contact the vendors.”
While Jim Kelly, a radio personality with FM96
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