Dan had become quickly ill and overnight began coughing up blood. I took him to the emergency room at 6 a.m. on Tuesday, Dec. 13. His blood pressure was a bit low. But after starting fluids, pain medication and an antibiotic for suspected pneumonia, it got even lower.
The individual moments blurred – me on my phone doing Google searches about the danger of his condition, his dad texting his mom that he was fine, the nurse saying he would be fine, none of us all too sure he was fine, Dan sitting up and ripping off the oxygen often because he was gagging on his own fluids then being told to lay back down, me texting people to pray for his blood pressure to come up so they could finish diagnostic testing to see what was causing him to be sick.
They removed him from everything but fluids because the nurse initially thought he was having a reaction to medication.
But the alarms continued to sound, and the nurse suddenly had a new look on her face as if she'd had a revelation. She stood over my husband frantically scanning the emergency room for the attending physician. Dan was in septic shock. I can recall the exact moment and expression in her eyes when this occurred to her. I also remember the sight of my husband, feet in the air, tubes everywhere. The sounds of him choking on the fluids that pooled in his lung and backed up into his trachea. And the smell. Oh. My. God. (That's a prayer!) The smell. Even Dan noticed it. He thought because he hadn’t showered that he was stinking up the room. But it wasn’t body odor, or at least a type of body odor I've ever encountered. This smell lingered only for awhile, and the only way I can explain it is that it smelled like death. It was the smell that scared me more than anything.
The doctor gave him a medication that was supposed to bring up his blood pressure, but it didn’t work even after an hour. We believe in prayer, and while I couldn't in this moment find the words I was searching for, I sent up groans and one-word requests and I asked others to pray because I could not. And Dan’s blood pressure finally rose.
He had his CT and was getting rolled back into the room when my friend Lorna walked in and prayed at his bedside with us. I don’t remember her words, just the comfort that it brought me. I remember thinking for no particular reason that he would be OK. I didn’t even realize the danger he had been in, nor did I for several more days. Most people (60-70 percent) who go into septic shock do not live. They may pass away quickly or linger on for days in Intensive Care Units.
Dan spent a couple days in ICU. I didn’t have enough paid time off built up to stay with him and then take off all the time I wanted to for Christmas and my sister's trip back to the States, so I did what I could to work as much as I could, take care of the kids and dogs, and see him as often as I could. He was in the hospital for a full week.
I managed well – terrific, in fact – during those days. I was almost proud of how well I held it all together. Later I even bragged to my physician that in those highly stressful days, I didn't have a single migraine. So, you see, I don't get stressed out. It's just not who I am. He chuckled at that and informed me that adrenaline keeps us going in times of stress and it's the letdown afterward that causes the "symptoms" of stress.
So the stress was building up....
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