For the last couple of days it has been hard to think about much else besides the well-being of a former voice student of mine, Austin Krueger, who collapsed Monday night while playing basketball at the RecPlex in Kenosha. He was flown Flight to Life to a hospital in MIlwaukee where he remains in intensive care, unconscious, and essentially on life support while doctor’s try to figure out exactly what happened and what kind of damage has been done.
Let me tell you about Austin. First of all, his personality is nothing like the picture above- I chose that to reflect the mood of all of us who are so intensely worried about Austin and what’s ahead for him. If I had a picture of him – and I may try to get one from Jamie Wilson, who has pictures from choir tour- you would see a vibrant young man with a smile on his face and a perpetual spring in his step. Austin is such a great young man- and so devoted to his mother, Marna. They make a quite a team.
Austin has contended for some time now with some sort of brain disorder which would cause him every few months to go into these episodes where he would experience serious fatigue and listlessness to the point of slight disorientation and inability to really function. When these spells would begin (and they would last for a week or more) Austin would have to miss school and would pretty much be confined to his bed until it would pass. I visited his home one time during one of these episodes and it was pretty scary to see this energetic, basketball-playing dynamo turned into a listess shell. And then a few days later it would pass and he would be himself again. The culprit seemed to be a spot on his brain, although I’m not sure if they were ever able to determine once and for all just what was causing the problem.
I’m not exactly sure when it happened, but sometime within perhaps the last year and a half or two years, this spot on his brain seemed to all but vanish- and Austin has had almost no episodes at all. (He felt a mild one coming on at the end of choir tour this spring, but otherwise has been in much better condition than he had been in quite some time.) Austin and his mom believed that a miracle of healing had occurred, because medical science had no explanation for what had transpired. But everything seemed to point to Austin having pretty much left all of this behind him.
That’s what made this collapse Monday night such a terrible and devastating surprise. . . and now his mom and other family, friends from church, and colleagues from Carthage are waiting and praying and hoping and dreading. . . what a terrible tumble of emotions for them – for all of us- who love Austin. With all our hearts we do not want to have to refer to him in past tense. We want to still be able to say “Austin IS. . . “ and in some ways even more importantly, we want to be able to say “Austin WILL. . . “