Morgan Semko

In November 2020, during the height of COVID, I began to get sick. I was experiencing many of the same symptoms that are associated with COVID, sore throat, body aches, high fever, nausea. I was seen at a local urgent care who was aware of my underlying illnesses, and I was only tested for COVID and sent home. This process repeated 3 times over the course of two weeks.

I finally ended up in the emergency room when I began to have difficulty breathing and severe pain in my neck. During my time at the emergency room an X-ray was performed, and they told me that my port looked fine, but I was developing pneumonia in my right lung. (Sepsis and Pneumonia) They told me to call my other doctor Monday and go home and rest. Little did they know that within 24 hours, I would be back in their emergency room after being found unresponsive on my bedroom floor with blue extremities.

My sister came to check on me because I was not answering my phone, she found me unresponsive on the floor in my room and my feet were turning purple. She managed to wake me up and she rushed me to the ER where I sat in a room for several hours crying over how bad my feet hurt. When the doctors finally came in they saw that my blood pressure was 63/29 and my oxygen was in the 60s. They rushed me up to the intensive care unit and put me on high flow oxygen until they could figure out what was wrong. They determined I needed to be med-flighted to another hospital and before my flight, I was diagnosed with septic shock, hypoxemic lung failure, and I had a blood clot in my right atrium. (Sepsis and Septic Shock)

I was electively intubated prior to the flight because I was not stable. I arrived at Children’s Hospital where I was placed into a medically induced coma so that my body could rest. On November 26th, Thanksgiving Day, I was in surgery having my port removed. The doctors ran a basket up an artery in my leg prepared to catch the clot before it fell to my lungs. However, quickly after beginning the surgery, the doctors realized this blood clot was not coming out this way, it was connected to the wall of my right atrium. I was returned to the CICU following surgery and the doctors met again to decide the new plan as the surgery did not go as expected. It was decided that I was not strong enough for open heart surgery, so for the next four days I would be placed on excessive amounts of blood thinners to see if the size of the clot would shrink. However, that did not happen so I was scheduled for emergency open heart surgery on December 1st.

I woke up on December 2nd, asking my parents what we were doing for Thanksgiving. Over the next few days, I began breathing treatments, cardiac rehab, occupational therapy, physical therapy, blood tests, and more medications than you can count. My toes were black due to loss of oxygen and I was informed that I had gangrene. I was in the hospital for 23 days, 18 of them in the ICU. I spent 12 days of my ICU visit on a ventilator and 10 of them in a medically induced coma. It is now 2 years following this incident and I am still having surgeries on my feet. I have had 3 partial amputations of my toes and will soon be having a total foot reconstruction. (Sepsis and Amputations) However, I am alive and will be graduating from college in May. Although, all of this could have been prevented if the doctors would have looked for anything other than COVID, I am grateful to be here today and be able to share my story with others. Hopefully, this inspires somebody.