Tee Doonan

Survivor

The entire week of April 15, 2013, I wasn’t feeling “right.” My brain was a bit foggy and I felt out of it. I managed to drive to work every day (one hour each way) and pretty much spent each day waiting for the day to be over. On Friday, April 19, 2013, I awoke to find my entire body covered in a small red pin dot rash – and I mean it was EVERYWHERE. It didn’t bother me (wasn’t itchy or sore), so I just assumed I had had an allergic reaction – maybe to the new patchouli soap I had bought at a funky store in upstate New York over the weekend. Really, at that point, I should have known something was very, very wrong.

I took some Benadryl and went to work. By the afternoon, my entire body was drenched in sweat, and my heart was doing a flip flop dance. I left work early and went to a walk-in clinic by my house. “Oh, you have an extreme case of contact dermatitis,” so I was told; take oatmeal baths and antihistamines and it should go away in a few days.”

So after a stop at CVS where I dutifully purchased oatmeal bath powder and more Benadryl, I drove myself home. I was too weak by now to even take that oatmeal bath and barely even made it onto my bed. My boyfriend got home around 7:00 pm that night and took one look at me and thought something was really wrong. I told him I would be better in the morning I just needed some sleep.

According to him, I started calling out his name around 5:00 am on Saturday, April 20, 2013 and told him “I’m dying.” There was no pain, no fever, no vomiting – but somewhere deep inside I knew I was dying. There is very little I remember after that – glimpses of police, firemen, EMS and ambulance crews in my bedroom, me on the floor, EMS communicating with the hospital in a very urgent voice. I heard one EMS say “she’s is not going to make it – let’s move.” The next I remember I was in an ER bay at Bridgeport Hospital and a doctor is leaning over me telling me that I was critically ill and they needed to move fast. My response? “No, can’t do it, I’m on my way to Brazil. I can’t miss my flight.” Apparently I tried climbing off the stretcher, convinced I had to get to the airport.

Fast forward and I hear muffled sounds and I’m flying down the hall on a stretcher being pushed by the surgical team themselves as they’re yelling “she’s crashing.” Literally doors are magically opening and people with carts are running around. I saw all of this through almost a third party observation. Finally the stretcher stopped and I vaguely see the faces of a surgical team of about 20 people, dressed in maroon, looking down at me. Many weeks later one of the surgeons told me that I tried to make a Bugs Bunny joke by calling them a “bunch of maroons…” That was it. For quite a while.

Intra-abdominal abscesses – who knew? Multiple ones that ruptured, ripping my large intestine and bowel open and spilling the contents into my bloodstream sending me into septic shock. The few days prior to the rupture there was a small leakage of my bowel contents into my bloodstream, which was causing me to get sicker and sicker – and then I bypassed all the usual stages and went right into septic shock, kidney, heart and lung failure. (Sepsis and Perforated Bowel)

Surgeons removed most of my large intestine, sigmoid colon and rectum and performed a colectomy (which results in having an external colostomy bag). They cleaned up my insides, and left my abdomen wide open. My belly button was gone. I had been on the operating table 14 hours. When it was over, some of the surgical team went out to the waiting room and told my sister and boyfriend to “pray for the best and prepare for the worst”; my chance of survival was about 20%, if that.

When my eyes opened I really just thought the anesthesia had worn off – until I realized something bad had happened. I couldn’t breathe and kept grabbing my throat and realized I was hooked up to numerous machines. I became agitated and started pulling at things and then that large lovely crowd of maroon was again around me. “Theresa – you’ve been in a coma – you are on a ventilator – we need to remove the breathing tube – we are giving you something to calm you down – you will hear a gurgling noise and feel some pressure in your throat – you need to breathe when we pull out the tube – breathe – breathe – suction – blood – suction.” I really can’t move my body. I see my sister and my boyfriend in the room, a doctor is saying “welcome back.” I start motioning with my hand, writing in the air. No one was paying attention to the fact that I was trying to say something. Finally the critical care nurse realizes and says out loud “Will I live?” (stating what I was writing in the air) and he said, “yes, yes, you are going to live.”

I had been in a coma for almost 10 days. My heart stopped twice. My kidneys failed. My right lung collapsed. My blood pressure plummeted to 40/30 and stayed there. There were 17 IV bags going into me at once. Central venous line; peripheral lines. Almost 50 pounds of fluid were pushed into me to try to increase the internal pressure to raise my blood pressure to no avail. A priest gave me last rites; my sister was figuring out what funeral parlor to call and how many plots were available in the family cemetery. My boyfriend cried at my bedside every day and night, laying his head on my legs.

Two weeks later I was moved to a step-down unit and then to a regular medical floor. After that I was moved to a rehab center for a month. Finally I was sent home with daily nursing care and daily wound care. My abdomen was cut from my sternum to my pubic bone and completely from side to side. The infection was so massive they couldn’t risk closing the incision; it had to heal from the inside out. I looked like a really sad hot cross bun. I lost a total of 60 pounds during all this. It took months of physical rehabilitation to get up a flight of stairs, or to take a shower and wash my hair, to drive a car. I was out of work and on disability for almost 1 year.

January 7, 2014 of this year I had the colostomy reversed. The surgeons also removed more of my large intestine, part of my peritoneum (lining of the abdominal cavity) and the rest of my sigmoid colon. They also fashioned me a new rectum. This surgery lasted 12 hours. I returned to work in April 2014.

I survived. Everything “works” as it should. I have worked hard at rebuilding my body and do yoga 5x a week, use weight machines and the treadmill. Somehow “dying” and surviving really does change you. Oh, and I do so badly want my belly button back.

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