Sandra Wilson

My mother was 71 years old when she faced septic shock. It was the Saturday before Mother’s Day 2014. I spoke with her that morning and she was fine. She and my father had gone to some yard sales and had breakfast and then come back home. Around early afternoon, she started feeling bad and decided to lay down. She told my father she felt feverish and that it felt like someone was stabbing hot needles into her arms. I called to check on her around 8 pm and my dad said she seemed a little worse.

Around 4 am Mother’s Day, my mother tried to get up to go to the restroom and could not stand up. She was on her hands and knees crawling. It was then my dad decided to take her to the emergency room. At the Emergency Room, she was diagnosed quickly with sepsis. My dad called me around 7 am to get to the ER as things were bad. When I got there, they had already started an IV directly into her neck. They were waiting on an ICU room to open. Within the hour, they got her into ICU where she proceeded to crash.

My mother’s pressure was almost completely gone and she was in respiratory failure. The ICU doctor threw us out of the room and put my mom on the ventilator. She informed us my mom was in full septic shock and would probably not make it.

We spend the next two straight days at the hospital with my mother who was on so many medicines they had to bring in an extra pump. She was unconscious on the vent. They put in a PICC line. Over the next few days, things continued to be a roller coaster. She went into renal failure and was only one day away from dialysis when that turned around. Then, her platelet count dropped and she required a platelet transfusion. After two weeks, she was final stable enough to leave ICU; however she was ventilator dependent. They put in a trach tube and a peg line (for stomach feeding) and transferred my mother to a specialty hospital for vent patients. After seven more weeks there, they were finally able to get her off of the ventilator. At that point, she could barely move and had lost 40 lbs.

My mother was then transferred to a transitional care inpatient rehab unit where she spent the next three weeks relearning how to walk, bathe herself, dress herself and other life skills. On August 6 2014, she finally was discharged and came home. It was the worst 3 months of my life. Fortunately, she remembers very little. The doctors were never able to get a definite culture as to why she went septic, but they think it was from a urinary tract infection. We are very grateful that we still have my mom and we pray for everyone who is, has been and will be impacted by sepsis.

Source: by Christie Jones (Sandra's daughter)