He Said It Was Okay to Die

By Reasa

It started with a cough.

One minute, Nicholas was lying in his hospital bed. Next, he began coughing, then suddenly vomiting an entire pint of blood.

I was holding the vomit bag. I caught it. And then I watched his face go pale as he looked at me, not panicked, but calm. So calm it scared me. Then he said:

“Mom, can you see it? The Lamb of Jesus? I can see him. He’s a brown lamb.”

He wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t crying. He was seeing something beyond the rest of us. In that moment, he was at peace.

Then everything changed.

Alarms went off. ICU staff rushed in. A doctor looked us straight in the eye and said the words no parent should ever hear:

“We have to intubate him now. It’s either here or in the OR. But it has to be now.”

There was no time to speak, hold his hand again, or prepare. In minutes, our son, our baby, only 11 years old, was sedated, paralyzed, and intubated. A machine would breathe for him while his body tried to survive.

We were told more than once to prepare for the worst. That he might not make it, but I couldn’t accept that. I wouldn’t.

And yet this moment, the one that haunts us most, is also the one Nicholas speaks about with grace. He remembers the Lamb of Jesus. He says it wasn’t scary. He says it was peaceful.

But we remember every second of that night.

The blood.

The fear.

The pleading.

The sound of machines.

The moment we almost lost our child.

And the sickening truth is: this was preventable.

Two days earlier, we were sent home from the Methodist Southlake ER with no antibiotics, no blood cultures, and no concern for the clearly abnormal vital signs. Sepsis protocols were never followed. No one warned us what was coming.

To be clear: they lied to us.

Methodist Southlake told us Nicholas’s labs were normal.

Dr. Teresa Proietti had the nurse deliver that message.

We trusted them.

And I carry the weight of that trust like a wound.

The guilt of believing them, when my gut said something was wrong, will never fully go away. I felt some measure of validation when CMS reviewed the records, confirmed their deception, and issued a federal violation. But that doesn’t undo the damage.

So now we fight, not just for Nicholas, but so no other parent has to hold a vomit bag full of blood… or hear a doctor say “it has to be now”… or watch their child say goodbye before their 12th birthday.

This is our truth. And we will not stop telling it.