TIFU By ignoring warning signs and almost dying of septic shock.

This happened to me 3 years ago and I’m posting this as a cautionary tale on the off chance it happens to someone else in the future.

A little background is needed here. My wife’s family, who lives next door, had just endured a week long stomach bug. As a result, when stomach bug-like pain started to manifest in my upper intestines, I dismissed it as being symptomatic of the afore mentioned bug.

I spent two days in a barely functional state with a light fever and progressing inability to keep warm. I was a mess, but I justified it as undergoing something normal and therefore denied frequent suggestions from my wife to get checked out. Surely in a day or two it would pass and I’d be back to myself, I thought.

On the evening of the second full day of this ‘bug’, and after spending much of the day cuddled in a thick fur blanket, I went to bed shivering. Not even piling the fur blanket on top of my existing blanket and with a heating pad underneath me could change that. As I lay shivering I promised my wife that ‘tomorrow’ I’d go to urgent care if I didn’t feel better.

Despite the violent shakes, It didn’t take long before I fell into a deep sleep. At around 2am, in a non-lucid, fever addled state of delirium, I rose from my side of the bed and walked around to the other side where my wife lay.

To this day I can only recall patches of events from what happened over the next hour, but my wife tells me that I grabbed her wrists with incredible force and in a panicked voice told her “It’s not going to work!” She was familiar with my occasional sleep talking, but could tell something was off. She tried to calm me down, but I just repeated, even more panicked ‘It’s not going to work’.

I attribute my wife’s attentiveness here with saving my life. Had she dismissed my ramblings as normal I would have been dead by morning. She immediately called her parents, who were fast asleep, and they came right over. At this point I recall vaguely being walked into the living room, but the world was spinning and I couldn’t seem to interact with the world outside my head. I was present, but I was also a long long way away. It felt almost like I was watching the world outside my head through a long tunnel. My body felt like it was sinking into the couch.

I was burning up, my wife and mother in law pulled everything out of the freezer and covered every inch of me. They then thought to take my temperature, which at that point was 106.5F. I lost consciousness and had a seizure, which was likely brought on by the high fever.

The ambulance had been called, but the two EMT’s were unequipped to bring me down stairs and so the fire department was called after they arrived. They strapped me to a stair descending chair and tried talking to me, but I was an empty shell.

Fortunately, after getting me outside into the winter air, my faculties began to somewhat return to me enough to realize what was happening and interact with the EMT’s who began asking me basic questions that I struggled to answer.

I looked down at my shirt, one I wore often which had large print words on it, but was unable to read it. At that point, Despite my increasing lucidity, I realized something was off.

My appendix had ruptured and my body was almost entirely septic. I was dying, and fast. My blood pressure was almost nonexistent and I learned my kidneys had shut down, with my lungs following suit.

It is important to note here that we live in a small town with a less than competent hospital staff with a bad reputation. They had misdiagnosed, for example, my grandmother’s arm that had been snapped clearly in half as being a simple sprain and sent the affected individual home where the arm got infinitely worse. At 90 years old, this was a critical issue that almost cost her life. There are many other similar stories, but I digress.

Fortunately for me, the only competent surgeon was on call that night. They needed to operate immediately, but my blood pressure was too low for the operation. They had to pump me with goodies so that I would survive the operation before taking out what was killing me.

I managed to pull through, but the surgeon informed me when he saw me the next day that had I not come when I did that I wouldn’t be alive, he went as far as to say that had I tried to go to the next town over (to be treated at a better hospital) I would have died on the way. Thanks to the shutting down of my organs and sepsis, It took a week in the ICU before I was fit to go home.

TLDR: Ignored signs of appendicitis, thinking it to be a stomach bug, for two days and almost died