Mariann M Ward

In 1998, I was a 38-year -ld nurse practitioner and expecting a baby after many years of miscarriages and infertility treatment. I was 22 weeks pregnant and my husband and I just broke the news after waiting to make sure it was “safe.” We told everyone on a Friday and then went to the beach for the weekend.

We came home Sunday night and I felt tired and had a sore throat. He left to go to work in the morning and I woke up feeling worse. I told him to go ahead to work and I would call the doctor and let him know what she said. I got out of bed and noticed that I was leaking amniotic fluid and had a temp of 101. I could barely get to the phone. This was kind of before cell phones so there was a delay in reaching him, so I got my brother-in-law to take me to the hospital. By the time I was at the hospital my temp was up to 103, I was tachycardic and breathing about 24 time a minute. (Sepsis and Pregnancy & Childbirth)

I started out in OB where we learned I had a fetal demise probably because of a high amniotic fluid leak that I just didn’t notice. They induced labor but I kept getting sicker and sicker. By the time I delivered the baby at 5PM that day I didn’t have a blood pressure, and they could barely feel pulses. To make matters worse they couldn’t deliver the placenta and it looked like I was headed for DIC. They took me to the OR to do a D & C and insert invasive lines.

At that time I worked for the anesthesia department and they took care of all the critical care OB patients. The looks on my colleagues faces said it all. They turned the monitors away so I couldn’t look at them and see my O2sat was in the 80s and my blood pressure was about 50. I had only a few minutes with my husband and baby until they whisked me to the OR. En route I went into respiratory arrest. I remember them running down the hall with the crash cart to the OR. They ran onto the elevator without letting the one passenger, an elderly lady, out. I remember seeing her face with eyes as big as saucers and looking panicked.

They rushed me into the OR and I remember asking them to please not let me die. I knew the odds and in 1998 they weren’t so good.
That was all I remembered until about 10 days later when I woke up intubated. I ended up with multi system organ failure, DIC, ARDS, kidney failure and an ileus. I really think the thing that saved me was the sheer resolve of all my coworkers who were determined that one of their own was not going to die if they had anything to do with it. They did tell my husband that I probably would not make it through the night. I can’t imagine what it was like for him, first the baby, then me. Thanks to the combined efforts of many people and a lot of prayers, I made it with fingers, toes and every other organ intact.

That was 22 years ago and I still can’t believe I made it. Despite all the advances since then too many people still die from sepsis. I was one of the very lucky ones.