Rob Hunt
I am a 43-year-old healthy male with slightly elevated blood pressure and mild-to-moderate Crohn’s disease. (Sepsis and Autoimmune Diseases) I have never had hospital visits for anything other than the Crohn’s and minor surgeries for torn muscles and or tendons.
After having dinner on May 9th, 2014, I began to have severe nausea and pain in the chest and back area. I was barely able to stand straight, as the pain was unbearable. I was able to throw up my dinner and I started to feel better. On May 10th, 2014, I went out to dinner with my fiancée and the same thing happened, except this time I could not throw up and started becoming jaundiced in color.
I went to an emergency department and I was admitted with an infected gallbladder. A stone had become lodged in my bile duct that needed to be removed. (Sepsis and Gallstones) I was prepped for an ERCP to remove the lodged stone, and gallbladder removal was scheduled for the following day. The surgeon explained the simple procedure to my family and myself. When asked if we had any questions, my fiancé asked if I could become septic as she works in the ED of a hospital. The doc’s reply was a laugh and no that doesn’t happen.
I remember waking up in the op room and thinking to myself, I can’t breath that well. I stood up from the operating table and began to walk for the door. At this point, I thought the surgery had not started yet and I simply did not receive enough gas. The anesthesiologist looked at me with a panicked look on his face and put the gas mask back on my face. I asked him to not put it back on my face as I could not breath at all with it on there. We went through this 3 times until I freaked out. I was not breathing at all and was going on adrenaline at this point, E-coli sepsis was rapidly poisoning my brain. I began to get very violent and went in to a survival mode throwing around the security guards that were summoned from the panic button in the operating room. (I am a bodybuilder and power lifter; I could bench 500 lbs the day before the hospitalization). Five guards were finally able to get me down for sedation. That is the last memory I have for the next few weeks until recently.
The docs explained to my fiancée and daughter that they had finished the procedure and had pulled the breathing tubes. They were busy doing post-op things and realized I was a blue ashy color. This is when I woke up in the panic. When the stone was removed, something happened, which to this day has not been explained to me, and I went in to septic shock. I had stopped breathing, temp went to 105, and I had a heart attack within 5 minutes. I was intubated and taken to the ICU. My family had left to get lunch and was waiting for a call from the nurse to let them know everything went well and I could have visitors. That call never came, instead the head nurse called and said they needed to come back immediately to meet with the doc and Chaplin. The staff explained to my family what happened and the condition I was in. They were warned that when they saw me, I had tubes and IVs everywhere and was in a medically induced comma.
The third day in the ICU, I became worse and my organs began to shut down. I had complete renal failure and my lungs were filling with fluid. My family and friends were warned that I may not make it through the night. It was a bad night and my family and friends prayed over my dormant body saying their goodbyes.
They began to evacuate the fluid from my lungs and treat me with a different suite of antibiotics. The next day I showed signs of improvement. They tried to extubate me the next day without success. This went on for a few days and finally I had started breathing on my own again. I awoke to my fiancée and daughter by my bedside. The only thing that came to my mind was confusion and to tell both of them I loved them very much. I was very confused but was not combative anymore. I had to be strapped to the bed when I was in the medically induced comma as I was trying to pull my tubes out and had already ripped out my IV. I was on the road to recovery.
I spent the next 8 days trying to figure out what happened, asking the same questions to my family with the same answers. I cried a lot which is atypical of me, as I could not comprehend what had happened and still did not realize the severity of my near death experience. I signed myself out of the hospital as I thought I would feel better in my own home and not in a hospital. Soon after getting home, I realized this may not have been the best decision as I had severe migraines, dizziness, blurred vision, confusion, and severe memory loss.
I needed to have my gallbladder removed still as I was not strong enough to survive additional surgeries. I had to wait until mid-July as the docs wanted to make sure I was strong enough to survive being sedated again. The gallbladder was removed without much incident.
I have began to recover a few memories of things that happened while I was in a coma, such as family arguments, doctor comments about me not doing well, and people that were there to visit me. These memories are very disturbing to me and I hope that I do not have more of them. I find it interesting that while your brain may be shut down due to medication, the brain still functions and absorbs things that cannot be stopped.
It is now October 27, 2014 and I have been to ENT, neurologists, and general physicians with complaints about all of the problems I had when I got home. I still have pretty severe memory loss, migraines, nightmares about docs trying to kill me, blurred vision, and hearing loss from the antibiotics that were used to treat the sepsis. I didn’t realize these were common post sepsis problems as not one doc told me. I play memory games and have started taking guitar lessons to try to keep my mind and memory going with fear of it getting worse at some point.
I know I am very lucky to be alive and in as good as shape as I am in. This is my story and I want sepsis awareness to become a more household known thing.
