I read a story about a woman that, over a few day's time, slipped into septic shock. She'd nagged doctors for a month that something was terribly wrong.
The delirium pulled her quickly, deeply into a nightmare filled world. Spiders climbed out of her hair, out of her earrings. She clawed them and threw them away, but even more crawled all over her. She couldn't escape the nightmares, she couldn't wake enough to realize how ill she was.
Sweat-drenched, she would wake now and then, stagger to the bathroom and collapse. She fell onto the floor, gasping, several times, but was too sick to tell anyone. No one asked. Why would they? She'd been sick for years. Decades. This was no different. She'd be fine another day.
She spent one morning dry heaving, the spider nightmares and sweat torturing her. Someone, somewhere, sent her to the emergency room.
She couldn't walk. Collapsed on a chair. Someone gave her a wheelchair. Someone asked questions. Someone took vitals. Someone asked. Someone asked. Someone asked. What are they saying? What do they want? I don't understand...
The only thing she insisted on over and over was she might have a urinary tract infection. No, never have symptoms. No other question stuck, no one made sense. People floated in and out of sight like wraiths, ghosts. Her boyfriend held her hand, she kept thinking this was a nice man. He hadn't been able to recognize her when he got to the hospital, she looked so sick. Yellow, waxy. Like the patients she had seen before death.
Blood was drawn again and again after hours spent trying to get a line in. Liters of fluid run, IV antibiotics. Then they ask the sick, delirious person if she wants to go home or be admitted.
She went home, delirium continued. Swaying in and out of consciousness, she staggered, gasping, to and from the bathroom. Someone took her to the emergency room. Someone asked questions. Someone changed nothing. See your primary provider. Your pulse is 102, blood pressure 86/66. It was pulse 140.
Your primary can't see you for a month. You tell someone to pray for you.
One single soul reaches out to you in all that time. One single soul that wasn't your housemate, wasn't your boyfriend.
That person was me. My grief is beyond my resources, for I feel I could be the person who died in their home...and no one found them for months. The person who died and no one came to their funeral. I lay in my still septic bed, crying with loneliness. For this is the reality of the chronically ill when sepsis hits.
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