Ryan Roberson was living the American dream back in the fall of 2012.
An avid sports fan and hunter, he was coaching kids in youth baseball on the side, while working at the family business, Roberson Floor in Indianola, with his parents J.R. and Wanda Roberson.
He was taking his son, Cooper, hunting, and his daughter, Olivia, was due to arrive soon.
“Ryan was somebody who never met a stranger,” his mother, Wanda, said. “He was like his dad. He loved to run his mouth. He loved to talk on the phone. He loved his kids. He loved sports. He loved hunting. He loved to teach other kids.”
Ryan passed away on Good Friday after battling a mysterious illness, which left him blind and paralyzed, for the last eight-and-a-half years of his life.
He fought a good fight, and he never lost his smile, his sense of humor or his love for sports.
His family never stopped fighting for Ryan either. They swore they would be advocates for him for as long as he lived, and they kept that promise until the end.
They are hoping that their battle over visitation rights in the final days of Ryan’s life will help shine light on some issues within the health care industry and hopefully inspire change.
His mother said the symptoms originally started to show right after a hunting trip that fall in 2012.
“He and Cooper had gone hunting that Saturday,” she said. “That Monday, he came into work, and his face was red.”
She thought his blood pressure might have been high, so she suggested he go see his sister, Whitney Roberson Crow, who at the time was a nurse practitioner in Indianola.
He waived it off, but later that day, another person at the office told him he needed to go to the doctor because of the redness in his face.
So, he did just that.
“He went, and he had a little fever, and they thought he was getting a sinus infection or the flu,” Wanda said.
The fever eventually subsided, but it was replaced by a terrible headache.
“He said, ‘Don’t touch my head, it hurts too much,’” Wanda recalled.
He was admitted to the hospital later in the week, and the fever returned.
Ryan would be moved to Jackson before the weekend, where a spinal tap was conducted. That revealed nothing, Wanda said.
By Monday, she said her son kept getting up to use the bathroom. It was frequent, and she became concerned when he told her that he was not able to go.
“A nurse did an ultrasound on his bladder, and he wasn’t putting out,” she said. “The next morning, he started losing it. He sounded like a computer going off. He didn’t know who I was.”
Meanwhile, his wife at the time was in another Jackson hospital about to give birth to their daughter, Olivia.
“Olivia was born the day Ryan went into ICU,” Wanda said.
Ryan soon went into a coma, which lasted for over a month.
“His heart quit twice,” Wanda said. “He stayed in a coma for about six weeks, and he woke up paralyzed and blind.”
Doctors were never able to determine what caused Ryan’s illness.
He was tested for everything, ranging from West Nile to AIDS.
Even a trip to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota yielded no more answers than they received in multiple Mississippi hospitals.
Ryan’s marriage eventually ended, Wanda said, but he maintained a close bond with Cooper and Olivia.
“Ryan had never physically seen Olivia,” she said. “He got to hold her and touch her.”
Wanda said the last eight years have been tough, but things got progressively worse for Ryan starting in July of 2020.
He was taken to a hospital in Memphis that month and remained there until last September.
He was in and out of hospitals for various reasons over the next few months, but his condition really began to deteriorate this spring.
Wanda said that the family had some minor issues with communication with doctors and nurses over the years.
That’s to be expected, but it wasn’t until Ryan was moved from St. Dominic Hospital in Jackson to Select Specialty Hospital, also in the Jackson metro, that lines were almost entirely cut off, Wanda said.
“We never saw a doctor there,” Wanda said. “I never saw his lung doctor. I don’t know who his lung doctor was. I understand there’s a lot of patients there, but within four hours (of visitation), I feel like some kind of doctor should have come around.”
The Enterprise-Tocsin reached out to Select Specialty’s corporate headquarters and left a message, but as of press time, that had not been returned.
Ryan’s sister Whitney, who has been in the health care profession for most of her adult life, was also frustrated with the lack of communication.
“How do you not keep families in the loop when we constantly ask?” Whitney said prior to Ryan’s death in April. “Why is the doctor not calling with frequent updates?”
To make matters worse, new COVID-19 rules at that particular hospital had visiting hours cut to just four hours a day, with only one visitor allowed per day.
And the hospital would not budge on that, despite Ryan’s declining condition, Wanda said.
Whitney fought hard to win longer visitation hours for her family but to no avail.
She made her way up the Select corporate chain of command, she said, but got no satisfaction.
“Despite my loss with corporate America, I’m still going to be an advocate for my brother and for others,” Whitney said back in April.
Whitney did note that after the lengthy battle, Select did expand its visiting hours, although patients’ families are still not allowed to stay overnight.
It was a small victory, Whitney said at the time, but by the time it was won, Ryan’s battle was nearly over.
He made the decision himself the week of Easter to remove life support and to return home to Indianola on Hospice care.
And that’s just what he did.
The family was able to be with him around the clock and talk, joke, smile and cry with the strongest person they ever knew.
“To go through what he did for eight-and-a-half years, he was stronger than anybody that I know. And that’s saying a lot,” Wanda said. “Sometimes I would close my eyes and just sit there and wonder, ‘How do you do this?’”
In death, the family hopes that Ryan’s experience will lead to better communication between doctors and families.
“If the doctors are not going to call these patients’ families, they need to hire somebody who knows what they’re doing who can call and tell them how the patient is doing that day,” Wanda said.
They are also hoping that hospitals will take a different approach to visiting hours, even during a pandemic, for families of patients who have terminal conditions.
“I hope and pray that they change these hours,” Wanda said.
Whitney said she challenges hospitals to allow family members of terminal patients to stay overnight and throughout the day, with multiple visitors each day.
“I hope Ryan’s story will shine light to hospitals and corporate offices to open the doors to these hospitals,” Whitney said. “Patients and families need each other.”
