I’ve decided to write out the details of my recent medical experience of becoming a sepsis survivor. I’m going to be sharing a lot of details. I don’t know if anyone will want to read this, but these blog posts will be more for me. It will be a way for me to work through everything that happened, share my experience, and keep it for future reference. When I go through something traumatic, writing about it helps me. And having it written down where I can go back and relive it for a moment helps me too. It’s a way to release and find closure. My story is long, especially if I include a lot of details so I’ll be splitting it into multiple posts. I hope that by writing it here rather than in a journal, others can better understand my story. Perhaps there is someone out there who has or will experience something similar and this story will help them see they aren’t alone. Perhaps someone out there needs to know we have a God who still heals, who still listens, who still cares.
How It All Began
It all started on January 4. I began to feel pain in my abdomen late at night. I noticed it when I was getting up in the middle of the night with my daughter, Ruthi, who was five months old at the time. The next morning, Sunday, Jan. 5, I was feeling so bad that I woke my husband up and asked him to take care of Ruthi so I could lay back down. We decided not to go to church because I was feeling so bad. At first, I thought it was just gas and took a Gas-X. Later, I thought maybe it was constipation because I had started taking a probiotic about a week or two before this, and I knew that can mess with your digestive system at first. That day I took stool softeners and Miralax.
I stayed in bed all day long. Travis, my husband, brought me Ruthi whenever it was time for her to eat. I was breastfeeding. He and our daughter, Raylee, who was two at the time, would come in and check on me periodically. That evening, I tried to get up to go get some water in the kitchen. I almost passed out. So we decided I would stay in bed and Travis would bring Ruthi to me if she needed to eat in the middle of the night.
On Monday, Jan. 6, I was still in pain. Travis went to work, and I stayed home with the girls as usual. I had went to the bathroom multiple times that day, so I knew the pain wasn’t from constipation. I had hoped going to the bathroom would relieve the pain, but it never got better. That evening, I decided to drive myself to Urgent Care after the girls were in bed. I could not stop shivering at that point, and it hurt worse to walk. I remember that I had to park on the opposite end of the parking lot, and it took me a long time to walk all the way into Urgent Care.
Once I got into an exam room, a nurse let me lay down and brought me a blanket. She saw how much I couldn’t stop shivering. The doctor did an exam. He said he could run some tests, but he felt it would be a waste of time and he would come to the same conclusion either way — that I needed to go to the ER. He said with abdomen pain, there were several possibilities and they were serious. I asked if I needed to go to the ER that night or if I could wait. He said I needed to go that night. I was upset as I called Travis. What were we supposed to do with the girls? At that point, Ruthi had been waking one to two times a night to eat and she refused to take a bottle. I knew leaving her at home would put more stress and anxiety on me. So we asked our next door neighbor to come sit at our house with the monitor while Raylee slept and we took Ruthi with us.
My First Trip to the ER
At the ER, the nurse in the triage area said he was afraid it was my appendix, and they would get me in right away. My heart rate was elevated. I wanted to say it was because I was so stressed out bringing my baby to an ER while my toddler slept at home with a neighbor.
Once I was examined, the doctor said it could be my appendix, my ovary, or diverticulitis. He ordered a CT scan. I texted my brother, who works at a hospital, to ask what to expect. The CT scan went just as he had told me it would. They told me it could take two hours before I would find out the results. But instead, the doctor came back in within 10 minutes. He said it was the largest appendix he had seen, it was definitely very infected, and it would for sure need to be removed. They scheduled surgery for the next morning. My mom left her house to come be with my girls. She lives three hours away. She arrived at our house around 2 a.m. to relieve our neighbor. They moved me to a regular hospital room. The surgeon ordered me some pain meds, but the nurse said they weren’t safe for breastfeeding. So I refused to take them, knowing I would need to feed Ruthi that night and the next morning right before my surgery.
That night was pretty terrible. We were all trying to sleep, and it wasn’t really working. I was worried about Ruthi sleeping in her car seat, but the nurses said they didn’t have any portable cribs or anything to put her in. We laid blankets down on the floor and laid her there, but she wouldn’t sleep there. Travis held her a lot that night. It was all just pretty miserable.
My Appendectomy
The morning of my surgery, Jan. 7, I woke up early and needed to go to the bathroom. But with the IV, I couldn’t get out of bed fast enough. I had diarrhea in my pants, and I was so upset. It took a long time for a nurse to come. I wanted to shower and clean up. I was nervous about my surgery and in a lot of pain. I was able to get myself into the shower and just clean myself as best I could. Then, I fed Ruthi before they came to get me for my surgery. Travis left with Ruthi to take her home and grab some things from our house before heading back to the hospital. As soon as I had fed Ruthi, I asked them to give me the pain meds. I don’t know if they gave them to me or not, but if they did, they didn’t help. I was in so much pain at that point that I was no longer worried about the surgery, I just wanted to get it over with.
After the surgery, I slowly woke up in a room with a nurse checking on me. It seemed like it was a big room with lots of patients in it and curtains between our beds. My nurse kept checking on me and the person on the other side of the curtain. She would feed me ice chips. The nurse told Travis that I was in a lot of pain and they were trying to control it before I could leave the recovery room. I eventually got back to Travis and our hospital room. I was so relieved to hear Ruthi had taken bottle from my mom. That was the first miracle we experienced. The next day, Jan. 8, we were discharged.
Surgery Recovery
Over the next week, lots of different people from my church or family members came to help me with the girls as I recovered from surgery. I had never had surgery before, so I didn’t know what recovery was going to be like. It was worse than I had imagined. I was in a lot of pain and experiencing diarrhea as the infection left my body. My milk supply had dropped a lot, and because recovery was so difficult I decided it wasn’t worth the fight to try to up my supply. I stopped breastfeeding and after using up all the breastmilk in our freezer, we switched to formula. Ruth did great with it — another blessing.
After a full week, I expected to be doing better than I was. On Jan. 15, I called my surgeon’s office to ask if what I was experiencing was normal and to ask about what pain medicine I should be taking since I had run out of what they had prescribed. The woman I talked to said it was normal. So I stuck it out. On Jan. 17, I felt I hadn’t improved any. In fact, I was worried I had gotten worse. I still had significant pain and I was experiencing uncontrollable diarrhea. I called the surgeon’s office again — I kept having to leave them voicemails because no one was answering the phones. This time, when they called me back two hours later, they asked if I had a fever, which I didn’t. I told the woman on the phone I was worried I had an infection, but she told me I was fine and everything I was experiencing was normal.
On Jan. 20, what I was experiencing was definitely not normal. After almost a week of sticking to the BRAT diet for my diarrhea, I finally ate a full meal. An hour later, I was in so much pain I was doubled over. I could hardly walk.
And that’s how it all began.
Read Part II here.
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