Trisha Stevens

On April 18, 2015, my mom, best friend, and biggest supporter was forever taken away from me. Until she contracted it, I had never heard of sepsis, or septic shock. That infection has forever changed my life and everyone close to my family. My mother, Trisha Stevens, was 58 years old and had so much more life to live.

This all started in March, about a month before she passed. I took her into her cardiologist, to the cath lab, to have a procedure done. My mother had a stint in her leg that was blocked again, and the doctor had to go in and unblock it. It was a simple, minor procedure. She wasn’t even put to sleep for it. They did the procedure, then released her 5 hours later to go home. She stayed that night with me because she was very sore. The doctor said that my mother should be sore for a few days, but should start feeling better by the next day. (Sepsis and Surgery)

The next day I took her home. My mother said she felt weak, but was ok to stay by herself. The day after that she called me and said she had fallen and couldn’t get up. I rushed over to see what was going on. When I got there, she was sitting on the floor by the couch and couldn’t get up. I went and had a neighbor help me get her up and asked her what happened. She said she just felt weak. After finding out that my mother hadn’t eaten much that day, I concluded that her blood sugar had more than likely dropped, making her dizzy. So I made her something to eat and left for the night. The next day she had called me saying she couldn’t pee…. I thought that was odd but we just decided she needed more fluids and that I would come over that afternoon and check on her.

My mother said the procedure site was ok, just sore. A few hours later I got another call from her saying she had fallen again and couldn’t get up. Since I wasn’t close by, we called my mother’s neighbor friend to run over and help her up. When I got there, he had helped her up and she was sitting in her recliner. I asked what happened and again she didn’t know. Just said she felt light headed. I checked her blood sugar and it was ok. She said something wasn’t right. So I packed her a bag and after 30 minutes of trying to get her in my car because she was so weak, and disorientated, we headed to my house. When we got there my husband had made fried chicken, which is one of mom’s favorite meals. I fixed her a plate and sat her on the recliner. She hardly touched her food, which was odd. She said she had to go to the restroom and tried to get up. She couldn’t get off the recliner. After several failed attempts, my husband and I helped her up and to the restroom. When I touched her arm it was on fire! She was burning hot. I automatically told them that we needed to get her to the ER because she had an infection.

After giving my mother a pain pill for the fever, we loaded her up and took her to the ER. By the time she was seen, she had no fever. I told the nurse that I had given her some meds and that’s why she didn’t have any then… The doctor came in and said that her sodium was very low. That was what was causing her disorientation and falling. When I asked about her fever, they just claimed that she didn’t have a fever. The hospital decided to keep her for observation. Another thing that I noticed while she was in the ER, was that she kept shivering. She said she wasn’t really cold, but couldn’t stop shivering. The doctor said lots of things could cause that, so I put it out of my mind.

The next morning when I arrived at the hospital I was told by the nurse that she had ran a fever during the night. You don’t say… They started her on an antibiotic for an infection, but we didn’t know what kind of infection or anything. She was in the hospital there for 7 days while they ran an IV antibiotic. While there she seemed more confused than normal, which she normally has trouble expressing herself due to strokes in her past. But she seemed more confused and they had a catheter in her, so she wasn’t getting up and walking any. The doctor decided she needed to go to a rehabilitation place to exercise and get her strength back.

We looked into a rehabilitation place in Ft. Worth, which was 2 hours away, but was supposed to be the best around. She was there a week. It was Easter Sunday when we went up for a visit. My mother had mentioned to me that her incision site had started to bleed some and the nurse had to keep a bandage on it. So the first thing I did when I got there was raise the blanket and check her incision. She was sitting there in a pool of blood. I immediately called for a nurse, and they came in and held it to get it to stop, and transferred her to ICU.

While she was in ICU it started bleeding again, so they transferred her to a major hospital there. It was very early in the morning and we didn’t know our way around, so we went to a hotel for the night. During the night I got a call asking for permission to start mom on dialysis because her kidneys weren’t working. When I had gotten to the hospital, they had her in cardiac ICU and said that her blood pressure was super low and they couldn’t keep it up. They also said her potassium was way high and her kidneys and liver weren’t properly functioning. She seemed to get very sick, very fast. Her incision started bleeding again and this time it was like a geyser and they couldn’t get it to stop. The cardiologist came in and didn’t want to do surgery until they could get her blood pressure stabilized and her kidneys functioning properly. But her leg wouldn’t quit bleeding. They had to do emergency surgery. I told my mom I loved her and she said she loved me before she went into surgery and that was the last time I got to talk to her.

She came out of surgery on life support. We thought the loss of blood was what caused her blood pressure to stay low for way too long, but all along she had the deadly infection, known as sepsis. By the time she had gotten to the new hospital she was already going into septic shock. My mother was on life support for about 10 days when we decided to take her off because she had irreversible damage to her brain. Ten days straight I had to sit there and watch this deadly infection take over her body. She lived almost 24 hours once we took her off life support. She was a fighter. Always has been, and she didn’t stop fighting until she took her last breath. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about her and how much I miss her. I can’t help but think, what if they would have checked for sepsis when I first took her to ER?? They could have taken immediate action and maybe she would still be here today. Maybe not, but her chances would have definitely been better.

This year I have started the first ever “Strike Out Sepsis” softball tournament, to raise money and awareness for the Sepsis Alliance. I wish I could stress to every person out there how deadly this infection is. How a person can seem perfectly fine one day, and not the next. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard, what’s sepsis?? If only I would have known. If only I had asked the right questions. Maybe, just maybe, my mother would still be here…

Source: by Nikki Hope (Trisha's daughter)