Professor Houston

We began classes on Monday afternoon where Buie Seawell, an ethics professor from DU, discussed some of the ethical issues we will be facing and Mark Taylor, a Construction Management professor from DU, talked about project management. Buie left and Syl Houston, a professor who has been traveling with us, was going to build on what we had been learning from Professor Seawell. The day that he was to begin teaching he came down with some type of food parasite and had to spend the day in bed and over the toilet. He remained sick for two days but was feeling better Friday afternoon. That night he woke up from his sleep throwing up blood. He was going in and out of consciousness but was eventually able to call and get some help. We rushed him to the hospital here in Tirana. Albanian hospitals are about what you would expect in a third world country so the facilities were not very good. Our professor did not feel comfortable with the facilities or the doctors and requested that no procedures be performed in Albania. We had already begun the process to get him air-lifted out of the country but were encountering some difficulty. His blood pressure was dropping and he was continuing to vomit up blood; it was becoming clear that something had to be done or he would bleed to death. The decision was made to stick a scope down his throat into his stomach to see if we could tell where the blood was coming from. The scope was not able to find any holes, ulcers, or any other cause for the bleeding, it was clear however that his stomach was completely filled with blood. We decided that he needed to get out of the country as soon as possible. We were able to get a medical plane to Tirana but then the doctors here felt that his condition was not stable enough to make the trip. For several hours they were trying to get him stable enough to travel, during this time his blood pressure almost dropped to zero twice. It was decided that something had to be done and it had to be done immediately. He had just thrown up again so the doctors did the scope one more time before cutting him open just to check and make sure there wasn’t anything they could do from the inside. They got the scope into his stomach and Houston began thrashing and rolled over onto his stomach. This gave the doctors a perfect view of a little hole that blood was squirting out of. They could see each heart beat. It was a blood vessel that had burst in his stomach and was not stopping because of the asprin he had been taking from being sick. They were able to cauterize the spot and create a temporary patch. They kept him in Albania for another 24 hours while he was being stabilized and then he was flown to Germany where they were able to fix the problem more permanently. While in Albania he lost a lot of blood which was replaced by blood several of the students on our trip donated. In the end his blood was entirely replaced two and a half times. This caused some minor complications during recovery in Germany because most of the blood he got was universal donor blood not his actual blood type. He is doing much better now and last I heard he was getting ready to fly back to Denver. Please keep Professor Houston in your prayers as this was a very frightening experience for him and he still has a lot of recovery to go through.