UTIs Make You Feel Like You Are Dying

UTIs have to be the worst kind of torture imaginable. They make you feel like you are dying when they go septic. At that point, you really are dying.

In October 2016, I woke up one morning and felt like my whole bladder was throbbing and aching. I also felt like I needed to empty my bladder. It was only 5 AM, Jeff was still sleeping at his apartment, and it was way too early for Melody or Lauren to be there. Luckily they always left a basin full of packaged clean catheters on my bedside table, and a basin to put the bags of pee that disconnected from the straight catheters as well as the used catheters there as well.

When I tried to self-cath, it burned so badly that I almost screamed and only about 25 ml came out. Ten minutes later I felt like I had to pee again. Again, only about 25 ml came out. At that point, the pain was already so bad that I felt like I was dying and I hadn’t even hit the worst of it yet.

Dying During a Monopoly Game

Somehow I stumbled through the day until the afternoon when Jeff and I were playing a Monopoly video game online with other people. Jeff had figured out how to rig it up to the big flat-screen TV I had hanging on my wall. That’s when I really started to feel like I was dying. The chills got so bad that I felt like ice all the way down to my bone marrow. I covered myself up with all four of the comforters that I owned and topped them off with a few fleece throw blankets.

“I can’t be under all of these blankets,” Jeff told me, “I’m sweating to death.”. He was indeed almost sopping wet with sweat. It was to the point where his clothes were drenched and my sheets were wet where he had been laying. Of course, Jeff always sweated a lot at night, but this was a bit over the top.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I’m so cold even with these ones on, my body can’t handle taking any of them off.”

Jeff looked at me lying there still violently shivering. My face was pale with really red cheeks.

“I’ll just sit in the spinny chair (black office chair) next to you instead.”  Jeff decided.

“I don’t want you to leave,” I told him.

“I’m not,” he promised.

“Look, I’m moving the chair all of the ways next to the bed and I can lean in on the bed and reach you.”

Swallowed By UTI Sepsis

I felt slightly comforted by that, but I was starting to get really dizzy and lightheaded.  Everything was starting to seem very far away.  In the distance, I sort of heard Jeff calling my name, but when I opened my mouth to respond I couldn’t get words to come out. Now I was starting to get really scared that I was literally on the verge of dying.

For a long time there was a deep blackness that swallowed me whole. I woke up to a room full of EMTs, paramedics, and firefighters. Jeff was sitting on the edge of the bed. He was holding my hand and telling me how much he loved me

“You can’t die on me, We need to spend our lives together,” he kept telling me.

A Case of Brain Scrambling UTI

“What happened?” One of the paramedics asked me.

“I’m pretty sure I have a really bad UTI. All of a sudden I just started getting chills and shivering. Right away I could tell that I had a fever. I can tell that it’s climbing. Then, while I was playing Monopoly with my boyfriend I started to get really dizzy”. As I spoke my words were slurring. I started saying some random stuff about Superman and Batman.  When I realized I was making no sense I caught myself and apologized.

“It’s ok, it’s the UTI, it messes with your brain too,” the paramedic explained to me as he felt my pulse.  “Your pulse is in the 150s, that is way too fast, I think you may be septic.”

If I hadn’t felt so sick, I would have laughed,” like that wasn’t blatantly obvious.

Jeff moved my IV pole so that it was in between the stretcher and my bed. Then handed me my G-tube drainage bag to hold onto, before picking me up out of bed and carrying me over to the stretcher.

Dying to See Jeff Again

“Royal treatment, I see,” one of the firefighters said. He was helping the paramedics. In his arms, he had all of my IV bags and the feeding tube bag along with their pumps. He was trying to hook them all on their flimsy collapsible IV pole.

“Only the best for my Becca,” Jeff told him.

I gave him a long hug before EMS rolled me out the door and into the waiting ambulance. If I was dying, which was a major possibility, I needed him to know how much I loved and appreciated him before they took me away.

Driving Lights and Sirens To the Hospital

While we were in the ambulance, they took my temperature, my blood pressure, and oxygen levels. When I saw the numbers, I knew they weren’t happy ones. They were confirming my suspicions that the UTI had hit my bloodstream and was now systemic. Dying terrified me, but as I lay back on the stretcher with the heart monitor going off and the ambulance driving me with lights and sirens to the hospital, it was all I could think about. My hands were trying to grip onto life, but it was getting hard to hold on.

The paramedic in the back with me switched out my nasal cannula for 5 L of oxygen through a mask. The heart monitor kept screaming out alarms. Even laying down my normal heart rate was usually about 110 to 120. In the back of the ambulance, it was in the 160s to 170s.

Dying is Not Allowed in the Ambulance

They didn’t even bother trying to put an IV in me. I already had a port running fluids. They were more interested in racing me to the hospital as fast as they could, they were worried about me dying in their ambulance. Besides, by now the two local ambulance companies knew me. They knew that I had no peripheral access left.  My peripheral veins were all used up and scarred. Years of going in and out of the hospital since the age of ten will do that to you.

Calling in Report

I listened when the paramedic in the back with me call in report to the hospital.

“We are inbound to your facility with a 26-year-old repeat two-six-year old whose chief complaint is possible UTI, we are calling this in as a sepsis alert.  Repeat this is a sepsis alert.  Vitals are as follows: rectal temp of 105.2, blood pressure of 77/43, oxygen level 82% ” on 5 Liters”

“Sepsis alert initiated, trauma room one on arrival”

“Copy that.”

Trauma Room One at Berkshire Medical Center

A team of doctors, nurses, and aides were waiting for me when the paramedics rolled me into the ER. They brought me right into the Trauma Room. A room reserved for the sickest of patients. the ones who were on the verge of dying. They began working on me immediately. Like in the ambulance, their heart monitor would not stop beeping out notes of panic in response to my crashing vital signs.