From Eric:
I am very honored and humbled to tell you about my beautiful wife Amber Sabala, and I thank you for making her this year’s honored patient.
My wife was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma and spent her last year in the Shreveport/Bossier City area. When my job relocated us here, she came kicking and screaming, but once we were here there was no other place she would have wanted to live.
Her story begins on October 16th 2008. We were sitting on the couch, and she had told me that she didn’t feel so good. We just chalked it up to a long week and that she was really tired. We were really hoping that she might be pregnant. She was leaving for a girls’ weekend the following day to go shopping with her best friend Emme who was our pastor’s wife. It was Emme’s 30th birthday. They decided to leave the 17th and were trying to leave early as possible. She got up when I did for work, and when she got out of the shower we both noticed a lot of bruising on her lower body. We were puzzled at what had caused it. We thought it might have been our dog who was always jumping on her or her just running into things. We really didn’t think much of it. So they left for Dallas that day, and all day long she texted me that she was very tired. They spent all day and the next day shopping. She made it home late that night and just went to bed. The next morning we got up and ready for church. This time when she got out of the shower, we noticed much more bruising. We decided to go to church and then go to Walgreens to get a pregnancy test. When it came back negative, we were devastated. That’s when we decided to go to the urgent care facility in Bossier. After doing a general examination, they sent Amber down to do a blood test. When they made it back to the room and settled in to talk with us, the doctor had already processed her results. The doctor told us that her white cell count was over 160,000 (normal white cell count is approximately 7,000-10,000). As the doctor was telling us this, they had already made arrangements to transfer Amber to the hospital. You can only imagine how scary that was for us. So we left to go to the hospital. Once there, they did several more tests to come to the final diagnosis, Acute Leukemia (M3). Little did I know from that moment forward, I would only have one more month with my wife.
Amber was immediately transferred to Louisiana State University Health Science Center in Shreveport where she began intense treatment. On October 23, she was moved to the ICU for internal bleeding. On October 29, Amber had improved and was moved out of the ICU. Then, on November 2, Amber returned to the ICU for what was to be her final stay. On November 13, her white blood cells had climbed to a healthy level, and on November 15, her doctor told the family that she would be moved to a regular room the next morning. However, later that afternoon, the doctors noticed that she was not as responsive as she had been. Early on the morning of November 16 (around 1:00 a.m.), a CAT scan was performed and it was found that she had suffered severe bleeding in the brain. A blood clot had formed, and it was determined that she was gone. At 11:00 a.m. on Sunday morning on November 16, 2008, just 4 weeks after she was diagnosed, the life-support machine was turned off. Amber was laid to rest in Bossier City, the place she called home, on November 20, 2008.
We celebrated our 4th wedding anniversary on October 23 while she was in the hospital. Since her death, I have celebrated a Thanksgiving, Christmas, and her birthday, March 16th, without her. She will always be a part of me. She will always be remembered. I will always BELIEVE that she is in a better place waiting for me.
Thank you for allowing me to share my story with you in the hope that others will never have to experience something like this or in the hope that I can make it easier for them.
Eric R. Sabala
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