Sara Lynn

It was just another ordinary day in my life…as ordinary as my life gets. It was around 11:30pm on April 19th, 2012, and just hours earlier I was at the playground with my kids, going to my fencing classes, and visiting family. I’d been feeling off for the last few days, pains in my lower stomach and back, but I thought nothing of it, assuming the stomach pain was just a result of the emergency cesarean section I’d had less then a month before to deliver my twin boys.

The last thing I expected when carrying my son to bed was to collapse to the floor unconscious. I don’t remember anything after that. My husband called 911 after he found me collapsed on the floor in my own bloody vomit and ran to my grandmother’s house banging on her door at midnight, in tears, asking her to come watch the kids while he went to the hospital with me.

I should have died that night. The EMS personnel basically told my boyfriend to “prepare” because my pulse was weak and I was barely breathing.

The duchess county EMS carried me to Vassar Brothers Medical Center, where they ran tests, poked me with IVs, and loaded me up on antibiotics before diagnosing me with Septic acute renal failure.

The doctor told my boyfriend if he had waited until morning to take me to the hospital, I would have died. I was completely catatonic, unable to answer the simplest questions or understand anything anybody told me.

I remember laying unconscious while my boyfriend talked to me, I was completely unable to answer him, even though I was screaming inside my head. Three days went by, and I slowly regained consciousness, waking up in the intensive care unit, with tubes down my throat and needles in my hands in arms.

I couldn’t hold myself up or stand, I was so weak. It was clear that I got Sepsis from a kidney infection that went undiagnosed because of my habit to play off any pain and act normal. If I had been treated for the kidney infection, I wouldn’t have almost lost my life those few days.

If I learned a lesson from this experience, it’s to never feel weak by expressing any pain or discomfort you’re having, and to always speak up because you never know that you might end up in the intensive care unit, fighting for yourself, your children, the people you love, and your life.