Sean Simonic

The Night Everything Changed

I was forty-four years old on May 5, 2018, when I loaded all four of my kids into the car to see Avengers: Infinity War. It was supposed to be a normal Saturday—a couple hours of popcorn, superheroes, and being a dad. But as the movie played, something inside me felt wrong. I kept coughing, over and over, each one hitting deeper than the last. Then, in the middle of that crowded theater, something exploded in my chest. It didn’t feel like a cough anymore—it felt like a bomb going off under my ribs.

By that night, I was the sickest I had ever been. My breathing turned ragged, my chest felt like it was being crushed, and the coughing wouldn’t stop. I drove myself to the ER, barely able to walk inside. They rushed me through tests, oxygen, monitors—but my body kept spiraling downward. Things were so severe that they loaded me into an ambulance and transferred me to another hospital entirely.

Within hours, I was in the ICU, hooked up to machines, surrounded by alarms, and told I had severe septic shock—my body shutting down from pneumonia I hadn’t even known I had. (Sepsis and Pneumonia) I thought I was just “off” for a few weeks. I had no idea I was dying.
I fought through two weeks in the ICU before they sent me home with an IV pump of antibiotics, but my body wasn’t done fighting. Within forty-eight hours, I collapsed again. Another ER. Another ICU. This time, no waiting.

I was rushed into a thoracotomy with decortication—a surgery as brutal as it sounds. They broke open my ribs. They peeled away the infected lining of my left lung. They removed the entire lower lobe. Tubes were driven into my side and deep into my lung to drain what was left inside. I woke up to a pain so sharp and unrelenting that it felt like being carved from the inside out.
That second stay in the ICU lasted another two weeks. At some point, the surgeon came to my bedside and told me something that still echoes in my mind: “If you had waited just a few more hours, you wouldn’t be here.”

I looked at my kids—my 14-year-old daughter and my boys who were 13, 10, and 8—and realized they had come terrifyingly close to losing their father. They had watched me disappear into ambulances and hospital rooms, not knowing if I’d ever walk back out.

Seven years have passed since that nightmare, but it never truly leaves. The nerve damage around my left ribs burns every day. The long-term effects follow me everywhere I go. Some mornings I wake up and feel every inch of what I went through. But I also wake up.
And that, to me, is everything.

I survived. I’m still here to raise my kids, to love them, to watch them grow. I was given a second chance—one I should not have lived long enough to receive—and every breath I take reminds me of how close I came to never taking another.