A Secret Killer: The Story of Sepsis

LISA CAME DOWN with what she initially thought was the flu. After a few days when her symptoms weren’t improving, she called her doctor’s office. The receptionist wouldn’t giver her an appointment, saying it was flu season and this was almost definitely what she had. Over the next few days, Lisa symptoms got worse. She was drinking litres of water but couldn’t go to the bathroom. She couldn’t eat, and she barely had any energy to stay awake. This went on for 5 days before she called Telehealth. As she was on the phone she got the urge to go to the washroom. “Yay!” exclaimed the nurse on the phone. Lisa went to the washroom and peed out blood. She called 911 and was taken to the hospital where a doctor held her hand and said “you are really sick.”

“I just remember saying ‘thank you,’” Lisa says. “Everybody kept telling me I had the flu so I was just so thankful that somebody was finally listening to me and recognizing how sick I really was.”

Lisa was suffering from sepsis—so severe, the doctors told her she wouldn’t have made it through the night. She kept falling in and out of a coma before the antibiotics finally started to kick in. The infection—which she contracted from dental work a few weeks prior—had caused 8 lesions to form on her liver. She spent just over two weeks in the hospital and then continued with antibiotics and at-home care for another five weeks.

“I knew I was dying,” says Lisa. “Having never felt that I was dying before I don’t even know how to describe to you that I knew. I just knew that whatever I had was fatal. I remember lying in bed one morning thinking ‘I could close my eyes and I know I won’t wake up.’”

Since suffering from sepsis in 2011, Lisa has been very vocal about the syndrome that almost killed her.

“You need to trust yourself; if everyone is saying you’re fine, walk into the hospital and say I think I have sepsis—that’s what I would have done if I had known,” she says. “Being armed with that information could change everything.”