My First Birthday. BIG part 20.

Happy Birthday to Me!

It is sort of a birthday, in a way.  A year since I was admitted to the hospital, septic, in shock, with necrotizing fasciitis already running ramped in my body and killing everything it touched.  A year ago would begin a 2 month hospital stint, 7 surgeries, countless IVs, PICC lines, arterial lines, a ventilator.

I don't remember much from the week before I was admitted to the hospital, as I described in the last post.  I can't tell you exactly what finally made me go in... my work friends had been calling and texting throughout the week to check on me, and when they talked to me Friday night, they said I didn't sound right.  I was adamant about not going into the ER....I wanted to wait until my parents were in from Virginia on Sunday.  Vanessa called again on Saturday and said she knew something was seriously wrong, and she was gonna go pick me up at home if she had to.  She talked to me first, and I said I was waiting until the morning to go in....and then she told me to put Jon on the phone....and told him "Get her ass into the ER NOW."  He listened.  And I finally listened.

Jon said in the days leading up to that night, I told him that I was fine, and this was normal, and I was on oral antibiotics, and I would be fine.  Since I'm a nurse, he believed me.  He said I refused to give in, and no one, including the doctor I saw in the office mid-week, knew how bad things were.  My systems were shutting down....liver, kidneys, heart, brain.  I was delirious.  I don't remember a thing.  Scary.

When I finally came into the ER, some of my nurse friends who were working that night came over to the ER to see me.  Vanessa told me... "Amy, you looked dead.  It was horrible."  The doctors and nurses told Jon that they didn't know if I'd make it through the night.  It didn't look good.

Antibiotics were started, pain medicines given, and a surgeon was called in.  Unfortunately the on-call surgeon that night was an ortho and didn't have a clue what we were dealing with.  The woman who performed my first three surgeries had never worked with necrotizing fasciitis.  After the first surgery they did to cut out a large chunk of my quad that was infected, I started hyperventilating... I was in pain and my lungs weren't working anymore.  Watching my breathing get faster and faster and the doctors basically telling my family that they couldn't do anything more was the worst 24 hours for my family.  When they told me how those first two days went, I get chills every time.  What a freaking nightmare.  Thank God Jon is a pillar of strength and thank God my family was there with him.  My husband, my dad, and my brother formed a team and had meetings with the doctors constantly.  They didn't take no for an answer.  They made sure everything that could be done was being done.  They asked the right questions, and didn't stop until they had answers.  They (along with God) may be the very reason I lived through it.

If you want to read the rest of my story, you can start here and keep reading through the posts.

A year later, it seems I've come SO FAR, but still have SO FAR to go.  I'm still not back to 100%.  I'm still scarred everywhere.  I still wear a wig or a ball cap everyday.  I still go to physical therapy 3 times a week.  I still have pain.

But I AM HERE.  I have to keep telling myself that, every time I scowl at those scars in the mirror, or every time my leg hurts so much after a run that I cry the whole way home.  And I have come so far.  I can walk without a limp....most of the time.  I'm not falling all the time anymore.  I can run- although it's a limp/run....and my speed is just about down to what it was post-illness.  My heart is bigger than my head, and I will never give up on this.  I'll won't stop until I run my 18th marathon.  And 19th.  And  20th.  I'm still working on my endurance.... without a muscle in my quad, it's difficult to be on my feet for extended periods of time, and I'm killing myself at the gym everyday to build up that endurance so I'll be able to return to work.

Thank you for supporting me this last year.  Thank you for your prayers that started a year ago, and continue today.  Those prayers have been my lifeline.  Thank you for letting me vent about my BIG in this blog, my anger, my grief and sadness, my happy moments, my accomplishments.  It's been a BIG part of my recovery, to be able to tell you what happened as I re-live it myself.  As my prayer warriors, you deserved to know what happened and how God worked.

Today is a day of celebration.  I'm going out with two of my closest girlfriends to celebrate our birthdays....her 30th and my 1st.  Because it's been a year since life as I knew it died, and the life I have now was born.  And it's a BIG life.