About Sharee
Sharee Calverley Lawer is a writer and stay-at-home mom. A totally ordinary person, she discovered the extraordinary in herself (and life) while helping her husband recover from a life-threatening illness.
Sharee has been many things: a lobbyist for a Fortune 50 company; a master's student in her 30's; a small business owner; a speaker, trainer and facilitator; and the COO of, initially, two and, now, four busy lives. Along the way, she has met all kinds of smart, interesting people. Drawing from her varied experiences is how she has developed her philosophy and outlook on life.
She has a BA from Baylor University and an MBA from New York University.
Why did you write You Will Get Through This?
I started writing this book in my head while my husband was still in the ICU. Our experience was so relentless - just when you thought things couldn't get worse, they did. I needed a device to help me keep my perspective and also maintain a running story board, of sorts, of where we started and where we were going.
I have always enjoyed writing and, at the time, I was an editor and writer for the blog The Hill is Home. In order to even attempt to digest the things that happened each day, I'd organize my thoughts like short blog posts.
I also had time. A lot of time. I had hours and hours each day for almost 100 days to observe our environment, ask questions, and develop and test my theories.
I wrote a few things, including this blog post, shortly after we came home from the hospital. As we came up on the three year anniversary of my husband's final discharge from the hospital, though, I felt like I had a good sense of how our story ended up - I'd gained perspective and seen how the whole experience played out.
Plus I was starting to forget things. I felt like I'd hit the sweet spot of understanding and articulating the big picture of our experience before I lost my memories of all the little details that steered me down the path I chose.
That is how You Will Get Through This came to be.
“The days may be dark, but there is light. It comes from inside you.”
Downloads
Here you will find a PDF of the table about finances from Chapter 3 that lays out my thought process for what to do if my husband couldn't work for a year.
And here you will find a PDF of the decision tree from Chapter 3 with questions to ask when a test or procedure is proposed.
One of the more emotional decisions I had to make was whether my husband would get a tracheotomy.
While in a coma, he was connected to a ventilator by a tube inserted through his mouth (intubation). Once his surgeons decided it was time to bring him out of the coma, there were two options:
- tracheotomy: he would remain connected to the ventilator, but through a smaller tube connected via an incision in his throat
- extubation: remove the tube and disconnect him from the ventilator
What I wanted was extubation. Simply removing the tube and disconnecting him from the ventilator felt like a bigger step toward normalcy, plus after so many weeks I just wanted to hear his voice.
With a tracheotomy, he could be brought out of the coma but still wouldn't be able to talk or move very much. He'd be awake, but unable to communicate. There was also the risk of damage to his vocal chords from the incision.
Once I sat down and thought through it, though, a tracheotomy was clearly the right decision. With extubation, I may have been able to talk to my husband for a while, but in all likelihood he would have been too weak to breathe on his own for very long.
In the end, being able to collect my thoughts, I saw the risks of extubation were far greater than those of the tracheotomy.
Questions or comments? Want to know more? Send me a message!