Septicaemia (Sepsis)

September 23, 2024

10 years ago back in 2014, I had nice meal out with my parents and girlfriend at the time. Later that night I started feeling very sick. I began throwing up a lot, and gradually got worse throughout the night. By the morning, I was starting to shiver like crazy as if it was freezing cold, however quite the contrary, my temperature was beginning to rise quite fast, getting to between 39°C – 40°C. My parents and girlfriend suggested I go to the Accident and Emergency (A&E) department, so off we went.

When I got there, it was busy as it always is, and my head was beginning to spin quite a lot, I don’t know how long I was waiting but for the first time in my life I felt like I was beginning to lose consciousness. My body began feeling veeeery weak, and I specifically remember feeling my heart beating hard in my chest, mixed with a conscious feeling of blood pumping around my body, it was WEIRD. Thankfully I was expedited to the front of the queue. When I tried to get up from my seat in the reception, I really couldn’t, it was as if there were sandbags on all my limbs. I was helped into a room, and I don’t remember much after that. To summarise, I was tested on a lot and the results were somewhat all over the place. There was clearly something very wrong but they couldn’t pin it down immediately.

I was put on a ward with lots of other very sick people, and eventually I was told that they believed I had Septicaemia/Sepsis AKA blood poisoning. At the time I had no clue what that was or how dangerous it could be, so I just brushed it off as some sort of virus and assumed I’d just be given a quick fix. Thankfully after some extremely hard drugs (Amoxocollin), I started getting better, and I was sent home 5 days later, the day before my birthday.

There I was the next morning, with my presents on my lap which I was about to open and I immediately felt the chills creeping in. I knew it was back, and the thermometer confirmed it. So, birthday cancelled, right back to the hospital we go after less than 24 hours of freedom! The doctor expressed a lot of concern as to why I was let out yesterday, as it clearly wasn’t out of my system.

For some reason he thought I was contagious (I still have no clue why he thought this), and I was put into a nicely isolated private room. After a day, it was somehow ruled out that I was contagious, and they told me they found E-coli in my system which was likely the underlying cause of the sepsis. Basically, something I ate probably had shit particles on it, and that contained E-coli. Great. So I was moved to a ward, and given more Amoxicillin. This time however, it wasn’t working and the sepsis was winning the fight, which was around the time I started to realise that this might be serious. They changed my IV drip and put me on something called Tazocin instead, which I was told was even stronger than Amoxicillin.

Oh boy. I’ve never done drugs in my life, but Tazocin is the closest I’ll probably ever get to experiencing being extremely high. This immediately relaxed me and one of the stories my girlfriend at the time told me was how I was trying to convince her about a ground breaking business idea:

The idea never saw investment sadly.

Animation by Alex Griendling

While high as a kite half awake, I remember a nurse coming in and began checking my blood pressure with a machine. The problem was, I still had the IV in my arm feeding me Tazocin right below it, and the pressure from the machine made a REALLY loud pop. She didn’t give the slightest shit, and went off on her way like an NPC. My arm bruised a lot, but despite my exploding vein, I was finally feeling better again after a week of Tazocin, and the timing couldn’t had been more perfect, my vacation to Dominican Republic was coming up in the next week. That would make up for the shitty birthday! 😀

5 days went by, and I was feeling mostly like my old self, just a bit weaker. I remember sitting on the couch of my newly rented house watching TV and playing with our cat… when suddenly… the feeling returned again. Fuuuuck. I went to a different hospital this time that was closer to my new home and was fast tracked into the same situation again. Ward. Tazocin.

Vacation cancelled.

For some reason in this new hospital, they wanted to do a colonoscopy. They gave me this salty lemony drink to clear my bowels that the nurse made super clear that I HAD to drink it. I cannot express how much I hated this, whenever I took a sip, I was gagging and nearly puking, it is still to this day the worst thing I’ve ever tasted. I had to drink two litres of this stuff, but I could only manage one. The nurse went apeshit at me, but then sent me off anyway in hopes that it worked. They laid me down on this table like an ALDI roast chicken and this robot goes up my ass, which I have a full view of on a screen. Great. If you ever get the opportunity to see inside your own ass, I don’t recommend it, it looked like something out of DOOM 1, so I just looked away instead. You could hear the doctor getting pissed, because my bowels should be clear, instead he saw a turd greeting him. Lmao. He gave up, probably reconsidered his job and I was sent back to the ward. I still have no clue why they wanted to do that to me, it never came up again.

Then, this new nurse gave me some cardboard and told me to piss in it instead of going the toilet. In my drugged up state I didn’t question it, and just started peeing in these cardboard … bottles? (???).

This made life pretty easy for the next few days until my regular nurse noticed, she came over.

“Why are you peeing in this?”

“Can you walk?”

“Yes.”

“Then go to the toilet! You don’t need this!”

So I did, I found it really funny because in my high state, it never occurred to me that I should walk, weird. I hadn’t gotten out of bed for days at that point.

On my ward there was this very old guy who had apparently been there for nearly a year (The nurse told me they couldn’t get rid of him). To give a bit of context beforehand, there’s two alarms you can ring at your bed, one is “I’d like some help please” and the other is “IT’S FUCKING OVER FELLAS!”. One night at around 3am, that same alarm started ringing and it was REALLY LOUD. The ward filled with 10 nurses who rushed over to this old man who screamed at them “YOU SHOULD’VE BEEN QUICKER! I COULD’VE BEEN DEAD!” LOL, yep, he pressed the button to test them. I couldn’t sleep the remainder of that night, not because I was mad, but because I couldn’t stop crying laughing into my pillow.

I had been losing a lot of weight in the hospital, which was to be expected given my situation. My Mum started sneaking in KFC and Dominos pizza, which I’m sure the nurses would’ve frowned on, but I needed the calories bad.

Finally after another week, I was released again and thankfully this time I was completely free of sepsis. Yay. I learnt afterwards how deadly Septicaemia is, it’s apparently one of the biggest killers out there. Scary, but I’m glad I didn’t know that at the time. Overall I spent nearly a month in hospital, but because of the drugs it went by really fast, and honestly whenever I think about it, I just remember laughing my ass off most of the time while on Tazocin.