Leslie Kaster

I am the face of a SURVIVOR. I have survived a great many things in my life, including my own traumatic birth. I was a sickly child, and a sickly adult. A loner, a creative thinker, a nerd (which is a compliment to me, thank you very much); but most of all, a mother. In recent years, I have been a mother without her own 4 children.

Ever since 2008 I have been in bad states of mental health, mostly a result of how the ex treated me. Ever since the divorce in 2010, I have been without my children. Depression, anxiety, panic, seizures from chronic epilepsy, all grew rampant. I wanted a new life for myself, but I was extremely poor, homeless most of the time, and constantly sick with no insurance. I had to ride out all the sicknesses that came my way, including the ones that took me to the ER.

While I was living in Iowa in 2013 after having started college there, I was frequently ill. Mostly, it was seizures. Because I was in Iowa, I was able to obtain Medicaid so I could get decent health care for my myriad of problems. At one point, I got a bad stomach bug that had been going around. I will spare the gory details. I noticed within several weeks of starting school that my comprehension had significantly decreased. I am normally a very sharp intellectual, so this was extremely scary. I couldn’t understand words on the page or things people said. I felt like my brain got locked behind a prison. I was tired, all the time. Seizures kept increasing. It got to the point where I had to have specific accommodations for my classes. I could participate in class, but homework was practically impossible.

Finally, one day in mid-late April of 2013, I was on campus, walking back to class after lunch. I was outside and started hyperventilating and felt very lightheaded. I knew something was wrong, so I just sat down on the sidewalk. I blacked out. The last thing I remember, was a girl crying out, “are you alright?” That was it.

Some time later, I woke up in the hospital, in a padded bed. I was clueless, and exhausted, and there were IVs and wires all over me. Doctors told me I had multiple convulsions, that they wouldn’t stop, and I got life-flighted to Iowa City, and went into a coma, and was intubated. Ok, ummm, can someone say, scary? I was in a coma for a few days, and apparently my parents, one of my sisters, an aunt and uncle and a cousin came to see me while I lay dying and in a coma in ICU.

After a couple more days, my condition stabilized and I survived my ordeal. But, I couldn’t walk or do things on my own. My coordination was gone. They gave me an exiting diagnosis of ataxia and gave me a walker and sent me on my way. Next morning, I was evicted from the house I rented. Nowhere to go, no one to turn to. I ended up with my then boyfriend’s family in Missouri, sleeping on the couch and on the floor for about 4 months before being sent away from there, as well. I finally was able to walk again, but I had to fight for that ability. My comprehension got better but at times still went sluggish. My memory has holes.

In order to try to figure out what happened to me, I carefully looked through my hospital records and looked up the different terms that were in them. Some big ones, aside from status epilepticus (prolonged seizures), were aspiration pneumonia, sepsis, and septic shock. It looked like I had had some kind of infection for quite some time, and that the prolonged convulsions were unrelated to the epilepsy (they were totally uncharacteristic for me, I know that), but more a result of sudden severe drop in blood pressure from a domino effect of organ failure in the middle of occurring. It is still not entirely clear what the initial cause of infection was. But they did declare the aspiration, sepsis, and septic shock, anyway. Once I found out what those were, and that I actually survived, I wondered why they didn’t tell me hardly anything in the hospital. My parents were preparing for news of my death.

I finally moved back in with my parents. I can walk again. I have to learn how to run again. I have been working hard at building back up my comprehension, and am starting back at another school in a couple of weeks. I have holes in my memory that are annoying, but memory triggers help. Since the incident, I have not had a single seizure. It’s been over 8 months. I have made myself lower my stress levels, I have barely been sick at all. It was mostly during the few months following the event that I struggled the most, with continued depression, anxiety, comprehension problems, etc. Now, I am a SURVIVOR, and on my way to an even better life! Sepsis did NOT claim me.