Jaclyn “Jackie” Yeagley
In April 2015, a surgical attempt at weight loss surgery that was never completed left me in septic shock. (Sepsis and Surgery) I coded twice. My organs began shutting down, one by one, and I was placed on a ventilator, unsure if I would wake up again. The team fighting for me did everything right. I survived. What I didn’t know then was that surviving was only the first fight. The second one — quieter, longer, and far less understood — was still ahead of me.
I went home with no instructions. No one told me that for months, I’d be too weak to stand while getting ready in the morning, that I’d keep a stool in my bathroom to sit on just to brush my hair because I couldn’t lift my arms overhead. No one told me about the hair loss that would start around month three, or the brain fog that would make me feel like a stranger in my own mind, or the pain that would show up in my body with no explanation any test could give. I lost over 130 pounds in the years that followed, not through surgery, but through slowly rebuilding my relationship with my body and my sense of safety in it. Somewhere in that process I realized: it was never about the weight. Except the weight I carried for so long that didn’t belong to me.
For years, I didn’t have language for what was happening to me. I just knew I didn’t recognize myself, and that everyone around me expected the person I used to be. So, I performed her. I smiled. I showed up. I got quieter about my pain because it was easier than fighting to be believed. That’s what invisible illness like PSS does — it doesn’t just take your health, it can take your voice too, if you let it.
The turning point wasn’t a single moment. It was a slow accumulation of small ones: a rheumatology appointment eleven years later that finally gave a name to pain I’d been told for years was “just in my head.” A conversation with an ICU nurse friend who told me, “We never know what happens to you after you leave our floor.” Learning that what I’d experienced had a name — post-sepsis syndrome — and that I wasn’t the only one who’d lived through it in silence.
The more I learned, the more I realized how much of my own recovery I had to piece together alone, through trial and error, because so little of it was ever explained to me at discharge. Validating what actually happened to my body. Learning to own my own timeline instead of measuring myself against who I used to be. Informing myself on what post-sepsis syndrome actually looks like. Connecting with other survivors who understood without me having to explain. And learning, slowly, to expect to advocate for myself, because your own voice is often the only one in the room that knows the truth of what you’re living through.
Recreating a “new normal” after sepsis isn’t about returning to who I was before. That person doesn’t exist anymore, and I’ve made peace with that. It’s about building forward — learning what my body needs now, not what it used to need. Learning that recovery isn’t linear, that some days will feel like progress, and some will feel like square one, sometimes in the same week. Learning that asking for help, asking questions twice, and refusing to be dismissed are not signs of weakness. They’re survival skills, the same as the ones that got me through the ICU.
I am a sepsis survivor, and I’ve spent years since learning what it means to educate and advocate — not just for myself, but for the survivors who come after me. Every survivor deserves to know that what they’re feeling is real, that they are not alone in it, and that their voice — however long it takes to find again — is worth reclaiming.
If we’re lucky enough to survive, the fight just starts. I’m still in it. And I’m grateful to stand alongside every other survivor and advocate doing the same.
