Maya Gebala, the 12-year-old victim of the Tumbler Ridge massacre who is fighting for her life in hospital, is battling another infection as her family waits by her bed, clinging to hope but wracked with despair.
The young hockey player, who is in a medically induced coma in the intensive-care unit at B.C. Children’s Hospital in Vancouver after she was shot during a Feb. 10 school shooting rampage in Tumbler Ridge, was scheduled to have
Saturday but an abscess in her brain forced a postponement.
Her mother, Cia Edmonds, who has been providing regular updates on social media, said Tuesday that Maya did have surgery but didn’t get the prosthetic piece of her skull put in place because of an abscess the size of a robin’s egg, which later grew to the size of a tennis ball.
Maya was one of two students airlifted to hospital following the shooting that left eight people dead and 27 injured. The shooter killed herself.
“How is Maya? … I don’t know,” Edmonds wrote. “Throughout the night it evolved, she cried in pain, I cried with her, all night long.”
Edmonds said they can only see CT scans of the infection because her youngest daughter has been unable to have an MRI because of the shards of metal in her head.
The family waited for seven hours while she was in surgery only to find out the abscess burst, which Edmonds described as being a pocket of infection that was so deep it couldn’t be seen.
“The surgeons spent hours cleaning this out, with no way to be certain,” she said.
Uncertainty has left her family exhausted from intense grief and emotional pain.
“I appreciate all the love she is receiving. She truly is living on a prayer,” Edmonds wrote, adding that roller-coaster doesn’t describe the highs and lows of hope and grief. “I imagine the 150-foot-drop tower rides, if they came down with the speed of a sledgehammer hitting tempered glass.”
There have been many signs of hope: From wiggled toes and breathing on her own to the odd smirk and hand-squeeze. But the infection is yet another setback.
Now they wait again.
Edmonds said so far the infection hasn’t grown, which could mean the surgery to clean the infection worked but doctors have also said she may need to start antibiotics again. The worst-case scenario is there’s an infection resistant to antibiotics.
“If this is a mutated version spreading, that is now resistant to these antibiotics, that leaves minimal hope for a cure … it could continue to spread, causing pain, and destruction, potentially even sepsis,” she wrote.
“I held onto her with unwavering pride and hope in her strength,” she wrote, only to be “shattered into a million pieces to hear that.”
Edmonds said that despite Maya’s fight, the likelihood of sepsis shock due to a mutated infection “could still call it for her.”
“My heart feels like it’s a shrivelled raisin, barely beating, and just waiting … waiting … I find her in my dreams … she is by a lake, and she is also waiting.”
after she tried to protect her classmates by locking the door. The seventh-grader was in the library at the time of the shooting and, based on what family was told, displayed a bravery and selflessness beyond her years.
The door lock was broken and the shooter entered the library. Five people died inside the library and another person died in a stairwell.
The shooter fired one shot at Maya that grazed her cheek and ear. The second and third bullets hit Maya in the head and neck.
has been set up to help Maya’s family as they stay by her side at B.C. Children’s Hospital.
With files from Cheryl Chan
