Ricky Stephens

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Living nearly 1800 miles away from my parents, I just happened to be visiting my family for my final wedding dress fitting, which unbeknown to me would be two days before my dad passed away.

My dad, Ricky Stephens, came home after a long day at work and instantly went to bed. Soon after, he started vomiting and had a high fever. My mother and I tried to get him to go to the emergency room, but he insisted that he would be okay. The next morning, he told us to call him an ambulance as his body was in a tremendous amount of pain.

We quickly took him to the local emergency room where luckily we were put in a room right away. However, despite his high fever and continuous vomiting, the ER staff did not treat his case as an emergency and leisurely treated him with morphine and pain meds.

We were in the ER for 8 hours and they could not figure out what was wrong with him. Eventually, he was move to a regular hospital room, where he briefly stayed before his blood pressure dropped and he lost the capability to breath. He was then rushed to ICU and put on a ventilator. Twenty-four hours after arriving to the hospital, my dad had died.

This happened three weeks before my wedding and because of the tragedy of sepsis, my father was not there to walk me down the aisle. I keep replaying these moments in my head, wishing I would have known what I knew now so I could have nagged the ER doctors and nurses more.

Source: by Lauren Lahn (Ricky's daughter)

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