Ethel Mullins

My mother had breast cancer however we had been given hope that the medicine she was on would extend her life several more years. Late Aug 2018 she goes to the ER for back pain to learn she has a UTI she is kept in the hospital for several weeks. (Sepsis and Cancer, Sepsis and Urinary Tract Infections) She comes home for a day to then my father calling. My mother is in the floor of their home and he can’t get her up.

Call an ambulance, I get there later that evening. I leave out of town to receive a call from the nurses’ station. You and your father need to get here. Your mother is in ICU and she is very sick! Like how can this be when I saw her last she was sitting up talking on the phone, walking etc.

Get to the hospital they inform me to call the rest of the family. The first thing they ask was how long did they give your mother with cancer? They didn’t want to try to treat the sepsis but after they could see how upset I was and the belief that they would forgo treatment because they felt her life expectation wasn’t worth giving us that time.

They did do some dialysis. By that time it was too late. Her organs were shutting down by 2:20am my mother gone. The question is where did the sepsis start? At the hospital where she laid with a bag for too long for a UTI? Or somewhere else? One will never know and we will never have our mother back nor our father. Seven weeks later, I found my father dead on the same floor he couldn’t pick my mother up from. He had a massive heart attack.

Source: Amanda, daughter