The Faces of Sepsis
Doreen Bettencourt - survivor
Survivor of Sepsis: My Story
I arrived at the hospital on 3/29/04 for what I thought would be a routine surgery and I would be back on my feet in 2 or 3 weeks. After all, I was only going in to have a cyst taken off my ovary. It turns out to be this surgery would change the course of my life.
In the morning of 3/29 I was sitting in the waiting room with my mom, waiting to be called into the pre-op area and my son Jon walked in. I didn’t know it then but he came to the hospital because he had a strange feeling about this operation. I was taken to the OR for surgery and then went on to the recovery room.
The doctor came to the waiting area and told my mom he didn’t think I would be needing any more surgery, a comment to this day she doesn’t understand why it was said. I then was taken to the fourth floor to my room. That night I was not feeling well at all. I was in pain, anxious, and I was not myself. Family was in to see me and I was more quiet than usual. My sister Deb voiced that I was flush and warm. I told the nurse about my pain and I was told that it was normal after surgery, that it was gas and I was given a “laxative.” I was also told I need to “ambulate.”
The following day I was still in a lot of pain that was still being attributed to “normal after surgery.” That day, the doctor was going to discharge me but I told him I didn’t want to go because I felt sick. The pain was getting stronger and I was again instructed to ambulate to “move the gas around.”
By 10 pm on 3/30, I was lying on the bed, holding the side rails and I called for the nurse again. At this point I was alone and extremely anxious because the pain was intense. The nurse walked in the hall with me because “ambulating helped move the gas.” I continued to call the nurse throughout the night.
On 3/31 at 5:25 am I could feel myself giving up. The pain was intense. I hit the call light once again and when the nurse arrived in my room I was having “rigors” and an elevated temperature. My heart rate was in the 170s. My blood pressure was low.
At that point, many people were called to my room. They were struggling to get blood from me because I was shaking so bad. They started pumping me with cardiac meds and were preparing to send me to the ICU to be monitored for a cardiac issue.
My mother was called in and it was then explained to her that they now believed I had a perforated bowel and was septic, and I could die. I was taken back to the OR and when they opened me up they found “gross spillage of bowel content” in my peritoneal cavity. They dumped 6 liters of fluid into my abdomen in an attempt to clean it out. The doctors then “ran the bowel” looking for the hole. I was cut from one hip to the other, with the wound left open to heal from the inside out. A wound vac was put in place. They also placed an NG tube, which I kept pulling out due to confusion, so I was restrained to my bed. My mom told me I would offer anyone who walked by my bed fifty dollars to untie me. We laugh about that now, but it was not funny then.