Joe T.

I was sleeping a lot. My wife said something is wrong. I said I’m old (77 at the time) and need to go to bed sooner.

Couple of days later we to the Oshkosh air show for a week, didn’t feel good, had a poor appetite, but decided it was a cold. Come back on a Saturday and on Monday had to travel out of the country to Costa Rica for business. While in Costa Rica, I lost the ability to urinate. Contacted a local doctor who prescribed FlowMax and said he’d like to put me into the hospital for a few days because I had a fever. Decided to forgo the balance of my trip and return to USA.

Arrived home at 1am and felt terrible, had the shakes from chills. Went to sleep and couldn’t get warm, wife said I was hot and burning up. Decided at 6am to drive to the emergency room. In the ER, doctors told me I was in septic shock and did I want to be resuscitated or intubated and that I had respiratory failure, kidney failure, blood infection, norovirus, and my organs were shutting down. For whatever reason, the absolute right doctors were available in the ER. Pulmonary, infectious disease and critical cardiac care.

Spent the next 4 weeks in ICU, eventually had to undergo surgery to scrape the infection in my bladder because the IV antibiotics were just not working. I was very fortunate to survive, had to undergo daily IV infusions for the next 3 months for an hour at the hospital. Doctors told me to get an apple watch and setup the health app and one day while getting IV infusion I got an Afib alert. Went downstairs, saw a cardiologist and sure enough I ended up with Afib stage I, which we are now treating with meds.

My kidney function returned to normal, I still have issues with blood oxygen from time to time. Doctors told me I was very lucky to have survived and also survived the critical period immediately following. I can’t thank the ER doctors and the team assembled to help me enough. I made it and now am 78 and have a much different feeling towards life. The lesson I learned and advice I’d like to pass on is – Listen to your body, don’t take chances and think you can power thru. If you are running a fever which persist go see a doctor.