This is not pleasant but this experience has and is moving me to get this message out:
Educate yourself about sepsis and septic shock. Right now. Here’s a link to get you started: http://www.sepsisalliance.org/.
Right now a 48 year old woman with three teenage boys I have known for 20+ years is fully sedated in a hospital bed on a ventilator and a kidney dialysis machine and her liver has stopped working. They amputated her hands and feet yesterday afternoon and it is not clear that she will survive.
One week ago yesterday morning, she went to the doctor and was given antibiotics for strep throat and pain medication for pain in her shoulder. That night she collapsed and was taken to the hospital where sepsis developed into full septic shock and her family has had to watch helplessly while her body restricted blood flow to her limbs to try to save her vital organs.
This is a successful professional woman in her prime and she’ll wake up, if she wakes up, to a devastatingly different life.
Please take a few minutes to learn about sepsis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sepsis). I now know more about it than I would ever want to but knowing ahead of time might have been the thing that changed this woman’s life. Or, rather, stopped it from changing.
I’ve disabled comments to this post but please take a moment and offer a short prayer or kind thought for her and educate yourself and others you know about this terrible condition.