Brooke Strong

On Thursday, December 31 2015, my mom complained to us about her back aching. She had thought maybe she had injured it the week prior when she fell snow shoeing with my dad, sister, and brother-in-law. She didn’t think very much about it when it was still hurting on Friday, January 1, 2016. I talked to her on the phone and told her that she needed to rest and be better for our weekly shopping date on Saturday. Saturday came and she was worse. She had started throwing up and told me that she didn’t know if it was from the pain in her back, or if she had the flu. She was figuring the flu though, and stayed home to rest more. Sunday came and she still wasn’t feeling any better and ended up missing my daughter’s 2nd birthday party.

For my mom to miss one of her grandkids’ events was huge. Her grandkids were her life and she loved spending every moment she could with them. She took my oldest son to school every day on her way to work, had lunch with me and my 2 girls every Monday, and watched them for me on Thursdays and Fridays. Every Saturday we spent the day shopping and hanging out with each other. She wouldn’t miss any chance to be with them. She was feeling so horrible though, that she just could not come to the birthday party. My dad decided to take her to urgent care.

At the urgent care, the doctor took her blood pressure, which was around 80/40, gave her some pain meds for her back, and sent her on her way. He completely disregarded her symptoms and complaints.

She was in so much pain and still throwing up the following day, Monday, January 4, that my dad decided to take her to the orthopedic doctor. He took some x-rays of her back, but didn’t see anything, so scheduled her for a MRI on a later day. My dad called me concerned because my mom was acting very loopy and wasn’t any better. He told me that he had tried to cut back on her pain meds because he thought that was the cause of the odd behavior, but when he did that she was in excruciating pain. I told him to take her to the ER and they would get the MRI done right away.

That night my mom started coughing up phlegm. She was sleeping in the other room on a lower bed as the pain had made it impossible for her to get in their normal bed. My dad checked on her a couple times but she said she was ok. Finally she told him that she thought she better go to the ER because she had never felt so horrible.

At around 3:30 am on Tuesday, January 5, my dad took my mom to the emergency room. She was really out of it and kept telling my dad that she could hear me in the waiting room and to let me back. She also kept saying she just wanted to go home and to please take her home. The doctors found she had pneumonia and decided to intubate her and try to give her lungs a little break and some help to get her better. (Sepsis and Pneumonia)

My dad called me around 10 am to let me know that mom was in the ICU. I rushed up there and saw her covered in tubes and IVs. The doctor was not sure what was going on with her, and whenever I asked about things, he answered me with “your mom is just really sick”. Her kidney function was being questioned, but unable to get any answers or even be treated like an adult from her doctor, I called the doctor I work for. He accessed her records and told me the only thing in there was her chest X-Ray and that it showed severe pneumonia. He also told me that some kidney failure could be a result of it, but once the pneumonia was taken care of the kidneys would come back too.

My mom continued to go downhill fast. Although her doctor only came in the room to check on her a couple times, he finally told us that she had sepsis and that we might want to call my sisters who live in different states.

My middle sister’s plane arrived around 3 pm and my mom’s health continued to decline. Her oxygen levels were extremely low despite max oxygen being given. Her heart was tachycardic the entire time and her kidneys had shut down completely. She was slowly dying in front of us and the doctor was no where. Shifts changed at 7 pm and her doctor never even stopped by before leaving.

A nurse took over her care for the evening and at 9:30 she asked if she could talk to us. My husband stayed with my mom and we went into a room next door. The nurse asked us how much intervention we wanted because my mom was not going to make it through the night. She didn’t know how much longer we had but she did know that by morning my mom would be dead.

How do you wrap your head around that? How did my mom, who took such good care of herself, ate right, worked out daily, be dying? How could my best friend, and children’s hero, only have hours left to live? Where was the doctor? Why didn’t he communicate more to us? Why didn’t he even check on her or give her the time of day? Didn’t he even care that she was the rock of our family?

We went back to my mom’s room and held her hands, rubbed her back, and cried. My oldest sister’s plane hadn’t landed yet and we begged my mom to hold on for her. I started to read to her a book from a series that we loved and her heart rate started to drop. At first we thought this might be a good thing, maybe she was coming through. We quickly realized that it wasn’t. Her heart rate kept slowly dropping. My sister and I clung to her hands, begging her to hold on. Pleading with God to please save her. At 12.53 am on January 6, 2016, my mom’s heart stopped and she took her last breath. My oldest sister walked in about 5 minutes later.

If the first doctor my mom had seen at urgent care had given her the time of day and a second look at the red flags presented to him, she might still be here. Had he just ordered a blood draw, he would see that something was wrong. Or if the orthopedic doctor had thought that her odd comments during her X-Ray was maybe something more, she might have been seen earlier. I really believe that if we had known about sepsis and the signs and symptoms, my mom would still be loving life and enjoying her days with her family and grandkids.

Her autopsy showed that she died from ARDs, due to sepsis which was a result of a staph infection that had ended up in her heart. (Sepsis and ARDS, Sepsis and Bacterial Infections) We have no idea where or when she got the staph infection. All we know is that our days are harder, our lives less bright, as my mom is missing.

Source: Haley - Daughter