“As NDEs go, it was a non-event. When everything stopped on 5 January 2019 – at about 1 a.m. – I was already unconscious. My shut-down and my reboot, when medical staff worked to resuscitate me in the corridor of Emergenza ed Accetazione (A&E), both completely passed me by.”
During a family holiday in Rome, what I thought was ‘a bit of a cold’ became a fever alternating with abnormal chills, became bringing up blood, became mottled skin. Eventually – too weak and in too much pain from a swollen left knee and right wrist – I was unable to move. When I was admitted to Policlinico Umberto I, I was presenting with double pneumonia, which moved on to sepsis, septic shock and cardiac arrest. and soon afterwards as cardiac arrest. I was resuscitated, intubated and placed in an induced coma. After a few very precarious days, a blood test revealed neisseria meningitidis bacteria as the principal cause of infection, and appropriate antibiotics turned things around. Because I was in an induced coma for six days, the critical time was much harder for my family than it was for me.
Six years on, I’m OK. The ends of my necrotic toes auto-amputated, and after four years the necrotic wound on my left heel closed up, though it still splits now and then. I still have moments of brain fog, random days of fatigue, but systemically I’m all right too. Physical recovery has taken a long time, and it hasn’t been linear, but it’s mostly been graspable.
Less, graspable – and strangely important to me – are the the hallucinations, dreams and delusions from those early weeks, and that brief period when I lived in a bi-polar universe, flitting between the coherent world of my family, and the parallel, often paranoid, telenovela world of the hospital, all based on what I thought I heard – in a language I don’t speak – in the corridor outside my room. Why those particular hallucinations: when ICU was sometimes a ward, or a Paris hotel, or a Soviet spacecraft? Why did a doctor’s smile frighten me so? Why were Queen performing live behind a curtain? Why was a nurse leading a sex and death cult on the ward? And why on earth did I call that nurse ‘Henry’?
They will likely broaden their scope, but for now, the Sepsis Confidential posts will mostly inhabit this strange, twilight world. I can’t deny there is an element of therapy to this, but my hope is that sepsis survivors and the families of survivors might also find something here of use or support.
* * *
Sepsis Confidential
also:
Same geezer, different hat: After sepsis
* * *
As a first port of call, the UK Sepsis Trust website is a very useful resource for sepsis survivors, families of survivors and those grieving for a loved one lost to sepsis. The podcast series Sepsis Voices With Dr Ron is helpful, too.
geezerinhat 