Liz Hopkins Ibsen

We evacuated to Columbus, GA, for hurricane Katrina in 2005. I spent endless hours watching the news footage and my co-workers on the roof of Tulane & Charity hospitals. One night I went to bed with chills, and my husband saw that my eyes were “rolling to the back of my head” and I was “burning up”. He called the front desk and Red Cross in a panic. They found a local physician who was taking in “refugees”. I couldn’t even sit up in a chair at the doctor’s office, so I laid on the floor.

They couldn’t get a blood pressure on me, so they started a 24G IV and give me a fluid bolus, which produced a palp pressure of 70! The doctor admitted me to the hospital across the street, where my chest x-ray showed a left upper lobe pneumonia. (Sepsis and Pneumonia) I stayed in the hospital a short 4 days for antibiotics, nebulizers and IVF. The doctors kept asking me if I knew how difficult it was to develop a left upper lobe pneumonia as a healthy 35yo woman. I explained that I was an RN from New Orleans. They determined it to be stress-induced from the trauma of watching the horrors unfold at home. Blessed be that I had no residual complications from the sepsis that I have unfortunately seen and cared for in so many patients in my 25+ years of nursing. I will always be a sepsis crusader!