This Just In – Next Tuesday, September 13, is World Sepsis Awareness Day. For me, the first week of September – every September from now on – is a sepsis awareness reminder. But every day is “Awareness Day” at my house.
Three years ago this week, I was in Connecticut to attend my brother-in-law’s wake. He had died rather suddenly the prior week while my husband was having his second surgery to remove kidney stones. I couldn’t get to Hartford right away, but I was able to get there in time for the wake.
The night before, the family gathered for dinner in a local restaurant. My sister and I sat together through the meal. I got a text from my husband that I showed to her with my “uh-oh” face. “I have a fever,” it said.
Sue and I agreed that post-surgery, that’s NOT good. That’s the bad thing you’re watching for. Tylenol, we said, and returned to dinner. Later that night, Rick and I were texting back and forth. The fever and shivering returned, but would relent with Tylenol. There was no sleep that night.
The next morning, Rick called into his surgeon’s office to request more/better antibiotics. Great. Not to worry. Our son left his father at midday to go to work. He was in the kitchen making some lunch for himself. No cause for alarm.
In the mid-afternoon, just before leaving for the wake, I got a text from Rick. “Going to 911”
I called. He answered in a voice so faint I could barely understand him. “I’m very weak,” he said. Then, nothing else. Nothing at all. I called back … several times. No answer.
I called my daughter-in-law and told her I needed for her to get to my house to sort this out. Thankfully, she lived five minutes away at the time. She and my grandson jumped in the car and arrived at my home to find an Orange County Sheriff’s deputy looking for an unlocked door or window so he wouldn’t have to break anything to gain entry.
Jamie dashed up to the front door. “Who are you?” asked the deputy. “I’m the daughter-in-law,” Jamie said. “I have a key.”
So in they came to find Rick collapsed on the bedroom floor. Paramedics arrived moments later. His blood pressure was barely detectable – about 50/30. Jamie put me on the phone with the paramedics. “He needs to go to ‘Big Duke’ or ‘Big UNC’,” he said. “Which one?”
Since his doctor was affiliated with Duke, it was off to Durham in the pouring rain with lights and sirens. I sat at the funeral home, waiting quite helplessly to hear what the next developments were. I didn’t tell my sister about this until after the wake was over, to explain my absence at a dinner that was planned.
That evening, I was texting back and forth with my older son who was in the ER with his father. “They’re saying it’s very serious,” Brian said.
I was on the 6:00 am flight back to North Carolina and son Rob took me straight to Duke Hospital and his father’s room. When I arrived, Rick was out of bed, sitting in a chair beside it, along with a Christmas tree of IVs – fluids and several antibiotics.
For the next week, we were both in Duke hospital. I “slept” in one of those reclining chairs that I pushed over next to his bed, allowing me to reach through the rails and rest my hand on his arm. He would awake during the night shivering and I’d summon the nurse. They would give him Tylenol but this was an ongoing test to see if the fever would return.
They took cultures of his blood for a few days to learn which specific bacteria had become a bloodborne septic infection with murder on its mind. Quite fortunately, it was staphylococcus – which exists harmlessly almost everywhere, but not in a human’s blood.
Sepsis kills 11 million people every year. Thanks to quick emergency response in Orange County and the patient, determined work of the infectious disease team at Duke, Rick suffered no organ damage from his septic infection. We heard from many doctors that this could easily have turned out very differently.
Exactly right. I never felt more like MacGyver – escaping against impossible odds.
Jean Bolduc is a freelance writer and the host of the Weekend Watercooler on 97.9 The Hill. She is the author of “African Americans of Durham & Orange Counties: An Oral History” (History Press, 2016) and has served on Orange County’s Human Relations Commission, The Alliance of AIDS Services-Carolina, the Orange County Housing Authority Board of Commissioners, and the Orange County Schools’ Equity Task Force. She was a featured columnist and reporter for the Chapel Hill Herald and the News & Observer.
Readers can reach Jean via email – jean@penandinc.com and via Twitter @JeanBolduc
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