Mark Balding

Admission/Discharge Dates: 6/22/12 – 7/25/12 LOS (length of stay): 30+ days of services

Background: Patient prior to admission had been a healthy 59-year-old male, working full time, active life style, volunteer fire fighter and American Legion baseball coach.

Diagnosis: Patient was admitted on 6/22 with shortness of breath. By noon the next day he was in severe septic shock. Diaphoretic, temperature 102+ degrees, BP dropped from 150 to 80, fever/chills and muscle convulsions.

Nursing Care: At the time that the shock symptoms first presented, there was no confirmed diagnosis other than fluid overload. The cause was not known. Around noon on 6/23, the blood culture results arrived, indicating that the patient had staphylococcus aureus of the blood.

~~~~

I really thought I was not going to make it. After wading through a maze of IV poles, multiple IV bags going at once, and more doctors and nurses is one room working than I had ever seen, the calm arrived. Like arriving in the eye of a hurricane, the tumultuous hours of septic shock faded away and a serene calm overcame me. All the caregivers slipped away save one, my nurse, who was with me for several more hours. I was alive! Alive! And surprisingly felt pretty good after being mugged by a staph infection. I felt pretty beat up!

For the next few days, wave after wave of bad news came through my door. On June 24th, I had a birthday. I was now 60 years old, and falling apart. First the cardio team informed me of the endocarditis diagnosis, then infectious disease doctors (ID) interrogated me from all angles as to the source of the staph bacteria and the risks ahead. The search and worry about where the bacteria had come from, where it had gone in my body and where is may be now hiding was more than I could handle. My nurse could see my despair and we talked often about how I was handling the bad news.

Finally, the other shoe dropped! A renal (kidney) MD appeared at my bed and gave me the news. My creatinine was almost 15 and my kidneys had failed. The infection had caused renal failure. Over the next few days, I began to wonder what more bad news awaited? My nephrologist (kidney specialist) ordered a kidney biopsy and it was confirmed. I had ESRD (end stage kidney/renal disease), with a small chance of recovery. The feelings of the weeks prior were reignited! There was great despair! How much worse could it get?

A long road to recovery lie ahead, and then there was the dialysis. The side affects were immense! My advocates on the nursing team were ever present, giving me medical and emotional care. My final discharge came on 7/25 and I began a new routine of dialysis visits and follow-ups with the four services who attended to my care. It has now been six months since I was discharged. On August 12th, to my surprise, my kidneys began to function. Progress! By the end of September, my sepsis had been cured and my kidneys were strong enough to come off dialysis. After a couple of months of rehab, I was able to return to work, and begin the road back to normalcy.