Trauma Nurses Rock

I don’t have any photos of the trauma nurses who helped me at University of Maryland. And I apologize, but I don’t remember their all their names. (Of course, I barely remembered my own name while hospitalized.) But I think it’s necessary for me to write a separate blog about them.

     First, let me tell you that the quality of care I received was mind-boggling. The R Cowley Adams Shock Trauma Unit at University of Maryland Medical Center is an amazing place. The paragraph below comes from the university’s website, and you can read more by clicking on this link: http://tinyurl.com/nsuvbjm.

       “The first trauma center of its kind in the United States, Shock Trauma is an international model for civilian and military teams, and remains the epicenter for trauma research, patient care, and teaching, both nationally and internationally today.  Shock Trauma is where the ‘golden hour’ concept of trauma was born and where many of the life-saving practices in modern trauma medicine were pioneered.”

           My surgeons were the best to be found anywhere. The technology was cutting-edge. But it was the trauma nurses who were on the front lines with me, night and day. They were smart, fast, calm, and highly skilled. These nurses were the most astounding examples of the outer limits of human multi-tasking I’ve ever seen.

          These girls rocked.

           I don’t use the word “girls” in a condescending fashion. I’m a writer and I try to paint a picture for my readers, and you need to know that most of the brilliant and dedicated nurses who took care of me were young, like below-thirty kind of young. There were a few exceptions – such as the middle-aged night nurse I would come to loathe for her bad perfume and liberal use of the light switch. But the point is, I remember being amazed at how hard every one of these nurses worked.

All told, I spent well over two months in the care of nurses at the R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center. It just so happened that I was there at an exceptionally crazy time. During the winter of 2011-2012, the place was stuffed to the gills with patients. Hallways were crowded with carts and machinery, doctors, nurses, technicians, and aides. I remember it was always tricky when orderlies tried to maneuver my hospital bed from my patient room to the operating room. Sometimes we banged into stuff. To me, the place had the feel of a two-bedroom house for a family of ten.

That’s because I was a patient in the old trauma unit while the new Shock Trauma tower was under construction. I didn’t know it at the time, but the old unit was designed to serve about 3,500 patients annually but was handling more than double that number. That explains why some of the logistics of patient care were problematic.

For example, when the glorious day came that my kidneys began to work without a catheter and I was strong enough to use a bedside commode, no one could find one for me. There weren’t enough to go around. So I was thrilled when an aide eventually tracked one down. The happiness was brief. As we soon discovered, the commode wasn’t being used by anyone because it had been Gerry rigged with a collection pail from one model and a seat from another. When the pail detached from the seat in mid-stream, the aide put her fists on her hips, shook her head, and said, “Oh, hell no.”

Whenever nurses would talk about the new $160 million facility under construction, a dreamy, far-away expression of bliss would settle upon their faces – kind of like how romance writers look when they speak of Hugh Jackman. The nurses would murmur about bigger rooms designed for modern technology and the promise of much-needed working space for staff. Yet, even in the crowded craziness of the old Shock Trauma Unit, the nurses held it down. They managed to juggle my complicated case with precision and caring, even in a less-than-perfect setting.

The nurses on my floor seemed to run a lot. From my little cave without a clear view of the action, I would hear their sneakers squeak as they raced up and down the hallway on their way to another life-and-death situation. When they would swoop in to check my vital signs or fix my IV line, they worked with speed and exactness while managing to be sweet and kind. I was amused when I saw how my nurses abbreviated almost everything. It was as if they were so busy they didn’t have time for extra syllables. For example, when my magnesium levels were too low and I had to have the mineral delivered via IV, the nurse hooked me up to a bag of “mag.”  Gabapentin, the medication I received for phantom limb pain, was shortened to “gaba.” The wound vacuum system that perpetually drained my amputation site was simply the “vac.”

These fast-moving, quick-thinking angels of mercy were awesome and I owe them my life.  

            Now, allow me to tell you about my Night Nurse Nemesis. She was a perfectly capable professional, but whenever I'd find out she was scheduled to be my nurse I’d roll my eyes and groan because I knew exactly what was in store for me. We just didn't get along. We were like Seinfeld and Newman. I didn’t like her style.

            My other night nurses would quietly slip in and turn on an indirect light to take my vital signs, examine me, or distribute medication while I continued to rest. Not this chick. She invaded my room like DEA agents busting into a meth lab. 

Do I sound cranky? Well, I was. I was exhausted and needed sleep, which was a real trick on the Shock Trauma Unit, with its alarms beeping, doors slamming, and conversations going on at all hours. I had this thing about my door being left open while I was trying to sleep. I even had my best friend, Arleen, make a sign to tape to my door that said in big black magic-marker letters: "PLEASE KEEP DOOR CLOSED."

Night Nurse Nemesis didn't have time for no stinkin' signs. She’d slam open my door at three a.m., flip on the searchlights, and announce that she had arrived and had important stuff to do.  Then she'd proceed to talk non-stop and make lots of extra noise banging shit around in the room. Eventually, she would sashay away, crop-dusting my room with her cheap-ass perfume on her way out, leaving all the lights on and my door wide open. When I'd call after her she wouldn't hear me. 

            Cranky. Like I said.

            Even as a kid I had a well-developed survival instinct. So when I first woke up in the Shock Trauma Unit and realized how sick and helpless I was, I got the lay of the land real quick. It was easy to see that the trauma nurses -- and their hardworking aides -- were my lifelines. I was utterly dependent on them, and I made a point of telling them how much I appreciated all the things they did for me, every day.       

            This blog is another way of saying thank you. Even to my Night Nurse Nemesis. 

Welcome To The Hotel California

There are many lovely and exotic places I can picture myself living for three months. The Costa Del Sol of Spain comes to mind, as does Manhattan, Seattle, Paris, Santa Fe, Bali, Costa Rica, Tuscany, or New Zealand.

But two hospitals and a nursing home nicknamed “Dr. Kevorkian’s Party Palace?” Not so much.

           And yet, I spent almost three months of my life in those places. For exactly eighty-four days I lay flat on my back in a hospital bed. For eighty-four days, I was poked and prodded by nurses, techs, and aides. I was sliced up by surgeons. I had strangers wash me, brush my teeth, and change my bandages and hospital gowns. There were physical therapists to move my limbs, occupational therapists to help me hold a cup, and respiratory therapists to check my oxygen saturation and lung capacity. My body was just another day at the office for every type of physician imaginable, including:

• ·      Orthopedic surgeons (Dr. O’Toole and a cadre of residents and fellows with various sub-specialties)
• ·      General surgeons
• ·      Vascular surgeons
• ·      Infectious disease specialists
• ·      Cardiologists
• ·      Radiologists
• ·      Nephrologists
• ·      Gastroenterologists
• ·      Urologists
• ·      Dermatologists
• ·      Pulmonologists
• ·      Hematologists
• ·      Psychiatrists
• ·      Neurologists
• ·      Hepatologists
• ·      Anesthesiologists
• ·      Pain-management anesthesiologists
• ·      And pharmacists

It was a good thing I was unconscious or drifting in and out of reality during two-thirds of my hospitalization. Because once I managed to deduce what was going on and where I was, I realized I was in hell.

Anyone who has spent time in a hospital knows that the process forces you to surrender your dignity and any sense of ownership of your own body. When I began to understand my situation, a profound sense of helplessness came over me. The old Susan would have taken one look at this bullshit arrangement and said, “I’m outa here.” But I wasn’t the old Susan. I was defenseless. I had no control over my brain or my body. I was a in a surreal limbo, alive but only barely. I was attached to wires, monitors, needles, a wound vacuum, tubes, alarms, and an automated blood pressure cuff. There was an inflated wrap on my uninjured leg, rhythmically squeezing and releasing to prevent blood clots.

I had no idea that I’d been pumped full of fluid to stabilize my blood pressure, so when I managed to lift my hands off the sheets I could not make sense of what I was seeing. My hands looked exactly like latex exam gloves blown up like balloons, only bright red in color. Oh, and my fingers were webbed. Yes, webbed. I’ve never taken LSD, but I think seeing my hands for the first time was akin to a bad acid trip. My fingers were painfully swollen to twice their normal size. The first few layers of skin had torn along the length of the inside and outside of each finger, creating transparent wings the consistency of stiff parchment paper.

The first word that floated through my drug-hammered mind was “monster.” I thought I had become a webbed-fingered swamp monster.

During one of my lucid moments – and when a breathing tube wasn’t shoved down my throat – my best friend, Arleen, recalls how I turned to her and asked, “Is this real or is this a dream?”

She assured me it was real. But I kept asking for clarification. Apparently, I wasn’t convinced.

“Okay, so, is this world my real life? Or was the other world my real life?”

Arleen says eventually she had no choice but to shake her head and tell me, “Honestly, Susan, I don’t know what’s real anymore.”

"Was the other world my real life?" Myself, my daughter, and Arleen, 2006  

Time ceased to exist. For many weeks I was assigned a room without a window. I only saw the sun when orderlies would roll me off for surgery, a trip that required us to pass through an atrium. I remember on more than one occasion asking them to stop for just a few seconds so I could enjoy the natural light coming through the glass. I remember crying at how beautiful it was, how wonderfully warm it felt on my face. I hated to see it go. I wanted more. Even in the haze of pain and drugs, I knew something huge and important had been ripped from me – my identity as a free person in a free world, where I could feel the sunshine.

I often hallucinated from the pain meds. I remember watching the walls of my room undulate because they were alive, composed of millions of tiny, writhing insects. I recall staring at the large analog clock in my room, puzzled by all the extra numbers and wondering why they were in Klingon. I stared out the glass wall into the nursing station thinking I was at a writer’s conference and was waiting in line at the hotel’s front desk.

My family and friends came as often as they could, but the hospital was an hour and a half from home and my loved ones had school and jobs and children of their own. So I spent most of the time alone, floating.

Sometimes I would open my eyes and try to scream. But I couldn’t. I wanted to ask questions, have someone talk to me because I was so terrified. But no sound would come out from my lips. No one could hear me. So I would lie there, scared, bewildered, drifting for what felt like forever in that insect-walled room with its Klingon clock, not knowing if I’d ever be allowed to leave.

Don't Cancel Your Gym Membership

Professional writers spend many hours sitting on our asses in front of our computers. Sad, but true. And since I started writing full-time in 2000 (hold on a second while I get my calculator . . .) Yes, that would make thirteen years that I’ve been sitting around on my ass for eight-to-fourteen hours per day. That’s a lot of ass time.

My kids were elementary school-aged when I started writing. I wrote when they were asleep, at school, before they woke up, or when my mother was with them. Of course, I ran around doing the usual mom things when I wasn’t strapped to my desk, but for the first couple years of my writing career I didn’t make a point of getting fit. My life was nothing but the kids, the house, the computer, and a doctor-husband who wasn’t around all that much.

Then one day in the fall of 2001, after I’d signed my first two-book deal with a publisher, I woke up and looked in the mirror to find that my ass had sculpted itself into the exact size and shape of the seat of my ergonomic office chair. (I don’t think that’s what the infomercials mean when they promise you’ll get “sculpted glutes.” ) Boy howdy, it was time for a change.

For the next five years, I was a fitness fanatic. I worked out six days a week (cardio, Zumba, yoga, hiking, walking, weights, Pilates) and cut back drastically on sugar, artificial sweeteners, refined flour, and fried foods. Yeah, I lost a ton of weight and I felt great, but please don’t be misled – I looked and felt fabulous for me. Kate Moss I was not. At my peak of adult fitness, I wore a size 10, and was damn proud of it. Okay, so let’s fast-forward to 2006, the year my husband and I separated. The process was an emotional, logistical, and financial carnival ride, and my dedication to health and fitness fell to the wayside. So that’s how it happened that in the autumn of 2010 I looked in the mirror again and saw that Mr. Office-Chair Booty was back in town. I went back to the gym.

Why am I telling you all this? Because one of the biggest questions about this whole ordeal is how I managed to survive an encounter with necrotizing fasciitis, and this is part of the answer. When I got sick in December 2011, I had a whole year of mindful eating and hard work at the gym behind me. I had given up the ass-shaping chair and gotten myself a treadmill desk, where I could write and walk at the same time. A lost a good bit of the weight I had put on and was enjoying kickboxing, Zumba, yoga, hiking, and weightlifting again. So when I lay there in University of Maryland’s Shock Trauma unit, doctors told my family and friends that I was remarkably strong for a fifty-year-old woman, and my general health made a huge difference in my ability to fight off an infection that could have killed me.

With my trainer, Chad, on my first day back in the gym, June, 2012

At this point I want to introduce you to a buddy of mine, Chad. He’s been my personal trainer and dear friend since 2010. With his encouragement, I was able to rebound from the stressful post-divorce years and really enjoy moving my body again. About two days before I ended up in the Shock Trauma unit, he was putting me through my paces with indoor sprints, ordering me to do figure eights around a course of little orange cones. I hated him for that, of course, but I was feeling pretty dang proud of myself – right up until the moment my left knee popped and I hobbled in pain.

Yes, this was the same knee where the infection would be found just days later. It was also the knee that had been surgically reconstructed after I blew out my ACL on the ski slopes in Colorado in 1991. But nobody knows if these events are connected to my illness, and every doctor I’ve asked has shaken his or her head and assured me it’s unlikely. And, to be honest, I had been feeling sick for a while before I hurt my knee working out with Chad.

Still . . . there have been many cases where otherwise healthy people contract flesh-eating bacteria with no external wound, so there must be something left to learn about the infection process, right? So, how I got this devastating illness remains a mystery.

After that episode with the orange cones, I was a no-show with Chad two days in a row. Since I never missed without advance notice, he got worried. He made some calls and found out I was in the hospital and wasn’t expected to make it. Chad remembers being stunned.

“I said out loud, ‘Holy shit!” Chad recalls. “’I just saw her a couple days ago and she was fine! How can she be near death?’ And then I thought, no. Not Susan. Nothing’s gonna kill that girl. She’s too strong.”

I did fight to stay alive. I might not have realized it at the time, but all the hard work I’d done in 2011 had prepared me for the most daunting physical challenge of my life.  Getting back in the gym had saved my life.

Too many times we’ve seen recent news stories about people who’ve suffered the sudden loss of limb – combat veterans, accident victims, terrorism targets, and casualties of natural disasters. Every story is a tragedy and my heart goes out to every person who has suffered that kind of sudden, irreversible loss. It must be devastating to wake up in the hospital to see that you’re without your hands, or legs, or feet.

I wouldn’t know, because that’s not how it happened for me. In my case, it was a slow, agonizing sickness that destroyed my overall heath before it claimed my leg. All of my organ systems were damaged by the infection and there was a time when one doctor told me not to get my hopes up that I would ever regain the function of my kidneys. “You may end up on dialysis the rest of your life,” she said. “You need to prepare yourself.”

So the amputation itself wasn't the primary battle for me. Before I could even deal with the reality of living with one leg, I had to heal from the inside out – my brain, my lungs, my kidneys, and my heart.

        I do remember briefly regaining consciousness after I had the amputation surgery. The recovery room nurse touched my arm and asked me if I understood that I only had one leg. I nodded.

But really, I was too sick and weak to care.

Romantic Strolls Along The Beach

            My family and friends watched in horror and disbelief as a University of Maryland Shock Trauma team scrambled to save me. The whole scene was surreal to them. How did the healthy, smiling Susan they’d always known become an unrecognizable blob overnight? 

That’s not hyperbole, either. My loved ones tell me I was a radish-red balloon of flesh with yellow eyes kept alive by a variety of machines. There were devices that filtered the infection out of my blood, gave me antibiotics and pain meds, kept me breathing, fed and hydrated me, and forced my kidneys to work. In order to elevate my dangerously low blood pressure, doctors pumped me full of so much fluid that when my brother, Sean, arrived from Upstate New York and rushed into my room he immediately backed out.

“There’s a mistake,” he told a trauma nurse. “That woman is not my sister.” 

The nurse gently assured him it was, and sent him back in. “If you want to see her, you should do it now,” she said. 

Months later, Sean told me that observing the doctors and nurses as they rushed around my body reminded of a NASCAR pit crew in action. Every second counted.

I recall almost nothing from the first two months in the hospital. I was, literally, “out of it,” adrift in a bizarre ocean of semi-consciousness, floating around the edges of being alive. Occasionally, I managed to break the surface and blink a few times before I’d go under again. What flashes of memory I do have I can’t trust. Whenever I talk about those first weeks in the hospital, my family and friends assure me that half of what I recall is out of chronological order and the other half never happened at all.

My altered state was due to the constant flow of narcotic pain meds into my veins and repeated anesthesia, since I was in and out of the operating room almost daily during those first weeks. It was a race between the nuclear-strength antibiotics and the flesh-eating bacteria, and every day the surgeons had to decide how much more of my left leg would have to be removed to keep me alive.

My best friend, Arleen, would sit for hours at my bedside during these first chaotic days. She would hold my hand, stroke me, and talk to me. I remember feeling her there. My first room in the Shock Trauma unit was so tiny that she could barely wedge her slim body in between the machines and medical personnel. When she asked if she was in their way, the harried nurses told her to stay. Arleen suspects they understood that touch was just as important at that point as removing toxins from my blood.

“I told them all about you,” she remembers. “That you had two kids and two crazy dogs and were a writer and had so many people who loved you. I wanted them to know that you weren’t just a slab of flesh lying on a table – you were a person.”

           As Arleen stroked my hand, she noticed that the fluid being forced into me to maintain my blood pressure had stretched my skin until it was shiny and tight. Blisters filled with liquid started to pop up everywhere, my body’s way of trying to make more room to accommodate the liquid. The blisters on my left hand and other sites eventually burst and bled, but Arleen kept touching me and stroking me, even though my blood was teeming with flesh-eating bacteria. She later said, “I was sure I was protected, kind of in the same way you know you won’t get sick drinking communion wine from a cup everyone else is using.”

Scars on my left hand, six months after I came home from the hospital.

All the trips to the operating room were necessary because what had started as a fist-sized infection site behind my left knee had spread down the length of my lower leg and up the inside of my thigh. It would be many months before I’d learn how close I came to losing my entire leg, part of my hip, and a section of my abdomen.

Simply put, I got very lucky. I landed in exactly the right place at the right time. Not only was I at University of Maryland – one of the best hospitals on the East Coast for a dire case like mine – but I’d fallen into the hands of Dr. Robert O’Toole, recognized as one of the finest orthopedic trauma surgeons in the country. Each time Dr. O’Toole and his team took me into surgery, they were forced to remove more and more fascia, fat, muscle, and eventually bone, trying to stop the infection while allowing me to keep my leg. One day the news would be good: “It looks like we’ll be able to save the leg.” The next day it would be bad:  “The infection has spread too far to save it.”

And some days the news was just plain horrible. My family and friends were told more than once that I wasn’t going to survive.

 My son, who was eighteen at the time, said that for the first couple weeks I came to him almost every night in his dreams. Conor said he felt comforted by my presence.

My sixteen-year-old daughter, Kathleen, had a waking vision one afternoon while resting on the family room couch in her father’s home. She said she felt my energy, then watched, shocked, as I appeared in front of her and told her, “I’m sorry, sweetie, but mommy may have to die.”

            Seems I was quite the social butterfly for a mostly dead person. In addition to my appearances in dreams and visions, my family and friends say I talked a lot, though I’ll have to take their word for it. I am told I dropped the “F” bomb with abandon during those first days in Shock Trauma, and they say I was alert and talking on December 23, 2011, when I gave permission for doctors to amputate my leg.

I was pretty entertaining that day, I'm told. Arleen recalls that I signed the patient consent form and then announced to everyone assembled in my hospital room that Dr. O’Toole planned to amputate my leg and then take it on a romantic stroll down the beach. Kathleen claims I told the nurses that my next book would be about “two amputees gettin’ it on.”

Under any other circumstance, I would be mortified to learn I behaved so badly in front of my kids and strangers, but I hear my loopy ramblings provided some much-needed levity in those first days and weeks.

There’s an old adage that says a person’s real character is revealed in moments of of extreme misfortune. If that’s true, then I guess I can say with confidence that I, Susan Donovan, will be a romantic comedy author to the bitter end.

Up, Up and Away

I was rolled into the emergency room of my local hospital in the wee hours of December 3, 2011. The facility is brand new, staffed with many skilled and compassionate doctors and nurses, some of whom I knew socially from my years as a doctor’s wife. They misdiagnosed my illness at first. Doctors told my family that I was merely dehydrated because I had gastroenteritis – the stomach flu – and that with IV fluids and rest I would be fine.

I don’t blame those doctors for the misdiagnosis. Yes, their mistake nearly dispatched me to the great beyond, but if I had been in their position I probably would have reached the same conclusion. Why?  Because the disease that was killing me is extremely rare. Necrotizing fasciitis, an infection caused by a flesh-eating strain of strep-A bacteria, strikes fewer than 800 people a year in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control. And nearly all of those cases are caused by a wound that became infected.

I didn’t have a wound. I didn’t have a cut or scrape or bruise or bump. Also, I didn’t have any underlying medical conditions that could have weakened my immune system, leaving me vulnerable to infection. So of course doctors wouldn’t think I was being eaten alive by killer bacteria.

Do you remember a May, 2012 news story about a Georgia graduate student named Aimee Copeland, who got cut on a homemade zip line and fell into a river? The wound on her leg was deep and required 22 staples to close, and days later she was diagnosed with necrotizing fasciitis. Doctors eventually had to amputate both of her hands, one leg, and her other foot.

I remember seeing Aimee’s story on TV. Oh, boy do I remember it. I had been home from the hospital just two months when her ordeal became a media event. I cried and cried for her, knowing all too well what she was going through and what lay ahead. I was so angry on her behalf. She was just 24 years old! She’d barely gotten started with her life! What the hell?

Booksigning, Summer 2011

After Aimee’s illness was publicized, hardly a month has passed without me hearing of a new victim. A mother of newborn twins in South Carolina contracted the illness in the maternity ward. An eleven-year-old boy from Queens, New York, received a minor cut on his arm in a school basketball game and was dead four days later. I recently found out there have been several cases of flesh eating bacteria in my town. The mother of one of my daughter’s classmates died from it just weeks before I got ill. A local pediatrician had a teenager die on the exam table. A middle-aged man showed up in the ER and couldn’t be saved.

So just what is happening here? That’s a bigger issue than what I can address in my little blog. Some scientists believe it’s a sign that the overuse of antibiotics has created super bacteria. The CDC says the occurrence of flesh-eating bacteria is not on the rise, despite the headlines. One thing everyone seems to agree on how the disease works.

Every human being is covered in bacteria. I’ve known that little fact since high school biology class, but it’s one of those things I decided I’d rather not think about. Now I think about it every day. Streptococcus-A, the same bacteria that causes strep throat, lives on everyone’s skin all the time. In other words, we humans are just another link in nature’s giant food chain. Our skin – the skin we routinely wash, exfoliate, moisturize, disinfect, protect, and obsess about – is crawling with bacteria no matter what we do. If you get a cut, bacteria can enter the body. Most of the time, you get some redness and swelling (called cellulitis) before it heals.

 I was stunned the first time I heard the words “flesh-eating bacteria” from a doctor. I thought . . . but I keep a clean house! I wash my hands with Howard Hughes-like regularity! This makes no sense! Apparently, being a clean person won’t protect you, and if you get necrotizing fasciitis, you have a twenty-five to seventy-five percent chance of dying from it, according to varying estimates.

Necrotizing fasciitis is the Tyrannosaurus-rex of cellulitis. Bacteria (strep-A in my case and in most cases of the disease) moves from the surface of the skin to the inside of the body, reproduces at a rapid rate, and then gives off toxins and enzymes that eat away at soft tissue and fascia, a sheath of tissue that covers muscle. My infection spread enough that the muscle and bone were destroyed as well, but if the disease is diagnosed quickly or is limited in its scope, patients can recover with little permanent damage. In more advanced cases, such as mine, necrotizing fasciitis causes excruciating pain, high fever, dangerously low blood pressure, organ system failure, and usually results in amputation.

So there I was in my local ER for most of December 3, 2011. I don’t recall much, really, though I do have one surreal memory. A nurse was running at my side as I was being rushed down a hallway on a gurney. I saw florescent lights passing in a blur overhead. She began yelling, “She’s crashing! She’s crashing!” Then the nurse began calling out what I figured were blood pressure numbers, which were getting smaller and smaller. The last number I heard was “40.” Without a “1” in front of it.

From here on out, most of what I will relay about the next couple months of my life will be secondhand. The information comes from my family, friends, medical records, Arleen’s emails, and diffuse, bizarre flashes of memory. So bear with me, please.

 Here’s what I’ve managed to piece together about that visit to my local hospital. I was in the ER when a surgeon on call stopped by to see me. He is guy I know socially, a doctor who had been over to the house several times to watch college football. He is a Penn State alum and my ex-husband and I went to Northwestern. The two schools are Big 10 conference rivals – well, if NU is having a decent season. But I digress.

So my surgeon friend ordered more blood tests. He began to suspect that something other than gastroenteritis was going on with me. He examined me thoroughly and found a small red and purple patch of skin behind my left knee. Everything happened fast after that.

Test results showed my white cell count was off the charts. My fever went above 105 degrees. They flipped me upside down on a table to keep blood pressure in my brain. The surgeon friend called my ex-husband to tell him I was in septic shock and on a helicopter headed to the University of Maryland’s Shock Trauma unit in Baltimore. My daughter, Kathleen, saw her father blanch white at the news.

Though it was a short trip via helicopter, John, my ex-husband, later told me he expected me to die in transit. It was what his twenty-plus years as a physician told him would be the likely outcome.

I don’t remember anything about that helicopter ride, the pilot, or the medical personnel who kept me alive on the trip. Whoever you are, thank you.