Ann Catherine L.

I am a sepsis survivor. Battered and bruised but still walking and talking. I am one of the lucky ones. We caught it early and my little local hospital threw enough varied antibiotics at me that we stopped the infections.

I had major female surgery at one of the big hospitals in Toronto and that surgery went really well, but a few days later I was awfully sleepy and I lost my appetite. On Monday morning I got out of bed and promptly collapsed. I called my daughter and asked her to take me to hospital as collapsing isn’t normal. I was frozen, so cold when we got to the hospital, I could not stand or walk, my blood pressure was 51/40 and I could not talk. The hospital took an hour and a half from walking in the door to a bed with tubes coming in and going out and on oxygen (94%). 

I do not remember much for that week: blood tests, my daughter, doctors talking (I can’t remember much of what people said). I remember people had auras, some had halos, there was a step on the way to the bathroom from my bed which I navigated each time, very carefully, with the help of the nurses. I was always cold. By the end of the first week, I went to the bathroom by myself. There was no step. It’s been 18 months and I still feel the weird, mixed up sick feeling…was I in the wrong room? Did they move the bathroom? My legs went up and down a step many times that week and I remember the step.

After a week, I was well enough to go home. However, I spent the next month on antibiotics and iron supplements. Friends and family came often to help me. I spent a month to six weeks either in bed or in my big armchair. I was back at the hospital five times in the next six months with infections that required serious antibiotics but not an overnight stay.

I developed aphasia from sepsis and became very depressed. It took several months for my mind to clear enough to feel comfortable talking to people and going out. I am still generally tired and easily fatigued. I look ten years older. My blood pressures is still really low, I am still anemic, I still lose words, but I am still here and getting better gradually. I worried for over a year that it would happen again. My personal hygiene became almost manic. My mind still worries but now at a more normal level.

Sepsis damages our body and our mind. I’m one of the lucky survivors; sepsis killed my husband in 2021 and my Mum in 2012. Sepsis destroys bodies and minds, yet isn’t recognized as a mass killer. My husband’s cause of death was listed as “heart”. No, it was a massive infection, sepsis throughout his system. Mum was the same. 

After an operation, patients should be taught to look for infections. We all know to look for red lines from an incision, who would think of sleepiness and appetite loss as signs of something really, really serious?