Renita Kilby

Survivor

I am a 48-year-old women and in good health when I was admitted to hospital for a simple surgery. The surgery was performed on 3 Nov 2010. Sometime during the surgery my bowel was sutured to my abdominal wall but this went unnoticed. (Sepsis and Surgery)

On 4 November, when I awoke, I was nauseated, sweaty and had trouble breathing. I informed the medical staff of my symptoms and was told the symptoms were normal and I needed to have an enema to make me go to the bathroom. After I received the enema I really started to feel much worse. Soon my blood pressure dropped, I was sweating profusely and developed signs of septic shock. I was rushed to emergency surgery because at that time my body was so infected my organs had begun to shut down.

I was in ICU for three weeks and almost died! I had to be placed in an induced coma with an open wound to drain all of the poison from my body. Because the infectious poison had spread to every part of my body, I had to be reopened three or four times so the wound could be washed from the inside. Consequently, I was still facing another surgery to fully close my abdomen so I was forced to wear a hernia belt support at all times until I had the complex hernia surgery 18 months later.

Furthermore I discovered while in the hospital I lost my ability to hear in my right with a loud ringing sound that keeps me up at night. I have since been diagnosed with severe hearing loss. According to doctors my hearing will never be restored. I have also been diagnosed with hypertension and am now taking medication to keep it under control.

In my opinion the doctor should have been taken time to ensure my colon was not punctured because with this type surgery the risk is highly elevated. Subsequently, if I had been given antibiotics when I first started showing systems of Sepsis it might have decreased the risk of infection. A “highly skilled” surgeon that has performed a great number of these surgeries, I believe, should know that.

The medical staff at the hospital should have caught the infection earlier because they are trained to recognize and treat symptoms of bowel obstruction. But instead they made the infection spread over my entire body by giving me an enema.

Overall I don’t feel the doctor or the hospital was considerate to me as a patient.

Before I was admitted to the ICU, the trauma surgeon doctors (who saved my life) assessed my situation and attempted to reach my doctor, but they were unsuccessful. The doctor did not answer his cell phone and was nowhere to be found. At one point one of the hospital staff mentioned the doctor was in North Carolina. Usually when a doctor leaves town he appoints someone to take over his duties.

I was on the respirator for most of my time in ICU because I could not breathe on my own. Once when the staff took me off the respirator to see if I could breathe without it, they discovered I still had fluid in my diaphragm. To my family it was evident something was not right because it was still difficult for me to breath. According to my mother, she spoke to a physician and stressed, something serious is wrong with me and every time she visits it seems to be more problems connected to her breathing. She informed me that she was so upset and worried about what was going on. Then the head doctor told my mother that they ordered a CAT scan to find out why it was hard for me to breathe. The CAT scan results show fluid was surrounding my lungs and it had to be drained. After the fluid was drained, I began to breathe normally.

Today, although it has been over two years I am still struggling with physical and emotional issues. (Sepsis and Post-Sepsis Syndrome) The hearing loss is getting worse because I am incapable of localizing sound and my hearing is agonizingly worse in the presence of any background noise. I cannot discriminate normal speech, quiet, or noisy conditions. My speech discrimination is severe because I also have tinnitus, in which there is a constant loud wind noise from inside my right ear. This is extremely frustrating for me because I already have a problem hearing outside sounds now I have to endure a continuous noise from within my ear. My hearing loss in one ear is not only traumatic for me; it is as well for my husband and family.

I encountered decreased quality of life problems nearly two years ago because I can no longer use audio instruments such as stereo headphones while exercising, hold a phone to my left ear and write at the same time because I am left handed. Furthermore my tinnitus has become more challenging because I have been diagnosed with anxiety, ADHD, depression, annoyance, and emotional distress.

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