A Secret Killer: The Story of Sepsis

IT WAS A Monday, and Stacy Kennedy felt a wave of discomfort take over her body. She leaned against the wall to compose herself, and decided to take her laptop home that night so she could work from home the next day. She didn’t get any work done though. For the next few days she laid in bed, blaming the flu for the extreme sickness she was feeling.  On Friday, she went to the hospital, but wasn’t given any diagnosis and was discharged. The next day she went out with her mother to get Tylenol, and on the way to the drug store she turned to her mother and said, “I think I’m dying.”

She went back to the hospital where the doctors discovered she had appendicitis, and she was taken in to have emergency surgery. Because it had been left untreated, the appendicitis had led to sepsis, and Stacy spent the next two weeks in the hospital recovering. But no one actually told her she had sepsis—it wasn’t until months later when she filed a complaint against the hospital that she was told she’d been suffering from this deadly syndrome.

“At the time, I didn’t realize that I was not only recovering from abdominal surgery, but from sepsis as well. Looking back, I now realize that I was in full blow post-sepsis syndrome.”

Two years after her run-in with sepsis, Stacy says she’s still not the same person she use to be. She received a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress during her recovery, and describes herself as two people— “pre-sepsis Stacy” and “post-sepsis Stacy.”

“My mental health recovery has been almost as difficult as my physical recovery,” she says. “My hair fell out, I had insomnia, it took me months before I could walk around the block of our neighborhood. I would come home from work, hang out with my family for 15 minutes and then go to bed.”

Stacy believes sepsis awareness is a critical part in allowing people to advocate for their own health.

“Imagine how useful it would have been for my mom to say, ‘have we thought of sepsis? Have you done the right blood work and tests for sepsis’? But at the time, it wasn’t even on our radar.”