Doctors pronounced NC dad brain dead. Then his family saw him moving, wife says
_fitted.png "Ryan Marlow, a pastor and father of three, is awaiting a bed at Duke University Hospital after it was determined that he is not brain dead.")
Megan Marlow stared into her camera, pacing in a hospital waiting room, as she gave an “unexpected update” on her husband’s condition.
Days after she began mourning the loss of her husband, Ryan Marlow, she had to share news that once seemed impossible.
“I can’t make this up. I cannot make this up,” Megan Marlow said during the Aug. 31 Facebook livestream. “Long story short, I’ll tell you the story another day, he’s not brain dead, my friends. He’s not brain dead.”
Her husband was originally pronounced brain dead on Saturday, Aug. 27, after spending about two weeks in the hospital with listeria, according to MeganMarlow.
Ryan Marlow has been receiving treatment at Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, according to WXII.
In a post on Saturday, Aug. 27, MeganMarlow said her husband — a pastor at Grace Baptist Church in Wilkes County, North Carolina, with whom she shared three children — had “taken a turn for the worse.”
A doctor said her husband was “clinically deceased,” Megan Marlow recounted, after he suffered “neurological death.”
Doctors told MeganMarlow that her husband, an organ donor, would be kept on life support until the hospital could locate recipients for each donation. She said she spent the weekend grappling with the loss of her husband.
Then, on Monday, Aug. 29, Marlow received a phone call from her husband’s doctor — her husband was still alive.
“Because of [Ryan’s] rare circumstance, they called in an expert panel and discovered that they made a mistake and that my husband, in fact, did not pass away. He did not suffer from neurological death,” she said during her Facebook Live. “I was told he still suffered a traumatic brain stem injury. And he was still basically brain dead, and all it did is now they were going to change the time of death.”
After realizing Megan Marlow’s husband was still clinging to life, doctors planned to mark his time of death as Tuesday, Aug. 30, when they were set to remove his organs for donation.
In her livestream, Megan Marlow said she almost did not make it to the hospital Tuesday, when she expected to say her final goodbye to her husband. She planned to send her parents into the operating room “to witness [Ryan Marlow] stop breathing on his own.”
“My family was going for me. My heart could not bear it. But I came,” she said. “I just kept feeling like I needed to be here.”
Upon arriving to the hospital, Megan Marlow’s niece told her that her husband had moved while family members were playing him videos of his children and singing to him.
“I’m crying, and I don’t want to have false hope,” Megan Marlow said. “This can happen when people are brain dead. They can have twitches.”
After talking to her niece, Megan Marlow said she went in to see her husband before telling the doctors she no longer wanted to pursue organ harvesting and instead wanted her husband’s brain function tested.
“Literally, our team was standing there waiting to take him,” Megan Marlow said in the livestream. “I tell the nurse, ‘stop everything right now. I want tests done to see if he’s brain dead. I need tests done now.’”
A CT scan showed that there was, indeed, still blood flow to Ryan Marlow’s brain, leaving him in a “deep coma.”
Since the scan on Tuesday, Megan Marlow’s husband has remained in critical condition. He is twitching and his heart rate elevates occasionally, but he is still unresponsive, she said during her livestream.
Duke University Hospital had agreed to accept Ryan Marlow as a patient, but after a video call on Sept. 1, doctors decided it was best for him to stay at Baptist, according to Megan Marlow.
“I need y’all to go to church and pray,” Megan Marlow said. “God’s kept him here. He’s supposed to be dead. He’s supposed to be at the funeral home right now.”
McClatchy News reached out to Duke University Hospital and Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and is awaiting response.
This story was originally published September 2, 2022 at 12:31 PM with the headline "Doctors pronounced NC dad brain dead. Then his family saw him moving, wife says."
