Cleveland Clinic heart surgeon Dr. Mark Gillinov recalled, "Pieces of the tumor had broken off and were speeding down her arteries like race cars, lodging in her brain, her legs, her feet and probably other organs."
The damage to her legs from the lack of blood was obvious. "It was pretty much as bad as I have ever seen, " said Dr. Sean Lyden, a vascular surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic. "Her legs looked mottled and purplish, and it really looked like she was going to lose her legs." But again, the physicians would try their best to help her.
There were just so many clots to remove. And they were long, some as long as pencils. Surgeons kept pulling them out one after another.
A scheduled one-hour operation ended up taking eight hours. The clots in her brain were too numerous and difficult to remove safely. Doctors could only hope that her brain was "plastic" or "adaptable" enough that functions from the damaged areas would be picked up by the remaining healthy parts.
The doctors had now done all they could. Marianne was in intensive care. The strain on her family was overwhelming. In the midst of it all, her 64-year-old father, Stanley Cook, died of a heart attack in his sleep. Doctors urged the family to delay telling Marianne for fear it would trigger more complications.
Marianne's whole right side was paralyzed. The family waited by her bedside and prayed. "We believe in the power of prayer," her mother said. And there was a lot of it. Her mother called the "prayer team" at her church. From there one person called another. Word, and prayers, were relayed from church to church, state to state. Within days "we had people across the country praying for her," said Wilma.
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