A Secret Killer: The Story of Sepsis

~As told by her daughter, Marisa Hrvatin

MARIA ENTERED THE hospital on October 23 for a routine surgery. She had a potentially cancerous polyp on her colon which needed to be removed. She was 81-years-old, so she was a little nervous about having surgery, but knew it had to be done. The surgery went well, and she seemed to be recovering. But two days later, she started to feel incredibly weak and began having severe diarrhea. She had no sign of a fever which is the main indicator of an infection, so the doctors said she was just taking a long time to recover because of her age.

But over the next few days she became so weak that she could barely walk. Her fever spiked, and they found she had developed an extremely severe infection—so severe that antibiotics wouldn’t be enough. Maria went in for a second surgery in an attempt to remove the infection. Her body had experienced so much trauma that she was placed in a medically induced coma to help her recover from the infection and the second surgery. But her body couldn’t fight the battle, and on October 30, 2016, just one week after entering the hospital, she died. The autopsy report showed that she died from organ failure as a result of sepsis, which developed because of the infection from her first surgery.

The truly tragic part, says Marisa, is that Maria’s death could have been prevented if the doctors had recognized it was sepsis sooner and started treatment.  

“No one believed me—I kept telling them that this wasn’t normal, that something was wrong, but no one listened,” says Marisa. “By the time they realized it was sepsis it was too late.”