Jane Harris Saufley

My mother had four symptoms late one evening. I told her if she didn’t feel better I was going to take her to the doctor the next day. Keep in mind this was an active realtor that lived on the lake. In the words of the ER doctor “ you mean that 72 year old lady that looked like she was 52!” She was my hero and best friend.

I checked on her the next morning after the symptoms appeared, after dropping my son off at school. She could barely dress to go to hospital. Hindsight being 20/20 I should have called ambulance. I just couldn’t mentally process my healthy mother was indeed that sick!

We sat in ER unattended for the most part for hours while she turned 50 shades of gray. I finally got their attention hours later as her condition radically deteriorated right before my eyes. They went from not giving her attention to airlifting her to a regional hospital. By the time we got my mother there, the staff informed me her sugar was so low they didn’t know if she would make it or not.

Mom made it through the night but one by one her organs shut down. The good lord blessed us with an incredible physician that delicately explained to me that he had over 3000 patients in the hospital and my mother was the sickest one of all. He didn’t know how to treat her. He couldn’t get the test results back for three days  and bottom line, we didn’t have three days. My mother coded the next day.

She went from working at in the real estate office on Tuesday to dying of sepsis on Saturday.

Source: Lee, Jane's daughter