My endo likely caused my sepsis
Sigh.
Monday 11/5 I stroll into hospital for my routine pain management procedure and 2 night ketamine infusion. Dorsal root ganglion block and pulse radio frequency of my sacral nerves. 4th time doing this, I get it done approx every 10 months bc unfortunetly there’s no permanent fix.
Anyways been through this before, it all goes off without a hitch.
Wednesday 13/5 @ 2am I get the most sudden worst headache of my life and oh my god I cannot stop shaking. I’m afebrile (had Panadol codeine a couple hours earlier) they throw diazepam and tapentadol down my throat. An hour later the shakes have settled and the headache is at about 50%. Now I’m tachycardic. ECG is done, doctor thinks I may be dehydrated. IV fluids are started and I’m able to go back to sleep. Just before 7am the shakes and headache start again. This time I have a fever, hypotensive and my heart rate is well and truely through the roof.
Sepsis protocol is done and I’m started on 2 different IV antibiotics. Obviously I’m not being discharged today!
Fast forward a couple days we have the blood culture results - My sepsis is caused klebsiella pneumoniae, gram negative. This is super weird apparently. This rules out the sepsis being caused by my procedure. It lives in the gut/bowel and bladder. Urine test and culture was clean. I have no other GI symptoms. The doctors are puzzled.
I spent some time reflecting that night. I had my second lap for my stage 4 endo done in early 2024. My endo plagues me with lots of adhesions. In this surgery they had to unstick my bowel from my vagina which was all stuck to my pelvic wall. They also shaved a spot off my rectum and unstuck the rest of me.
I think about the really horrible ripping sensations I’ve had over the past couple of weeks. However because my previous nerve procedure was wearing off I didn’t give it extra thought. I just continued popping my pills and getting on with life.
So I think - could my sepsis be caused by my endo?
The infectious disease doctor comes in the next day and tells me they’ll need to do a pelvic mri to see if they can’t find the source of the infection. I pose the questions to him - could an adhesion or lesion caused the start of the infection which lead to my sepsis????
I was not expecting him to be very enthusiastic about this possibility. Explaining that yes this is why they wanted the pelvic mri, because an adhesion could’ve made a micro tear in my bowel.
So now I’m waiting for these MRI results. I’ve learnt that my pain tolerance is way too high and it’s definetly dangerous.
I’m so glad I was already in hospital when this started, as it was purely a coincidence. As a nurse I would’ve just treated my fever/headache at home. Who knows how sick I could’ve gotten before I decided to seek help. And it could’ve been too late too.