Amira Ansari Journalism

Feature Story:

Before I thought that if you stayed in shape, and ate right you'd be in perfect shape and you couldn't get deadly sick. But, unfortunately you can. Mari Ansari, my mother, had come home one day from work exhausted and feeling like she had caught something. She decided to take off work for a week to just relax and get over whatever she had. The second week had come around and she still hadn’t gotten better yet. She thought she should check into the hospital anyways, even though she had the symptoms of Swine Flu she felt like something else just wasn’t right. She checked into the hospital on November 21st with a fever and cold. She was later sent home with Swine Flu which she had expected that after she had gotten some antibiotics she would go home and in a couple days be better. The next couple day’s things had just gotten worse. November 23rd, I had awoken to the sound of the ambulance. I didn't put two in two together, but when I had opened my bedroom door I had seen my mom put in the ambulance stretcher. The feeling in my stomach had just dropped, I looked around at my brother's and my dad and realized it wasn't a dream that this was actually happening right now. The reaction of all of them seemed the same as what mine had been. She was taken into emergency and couldn't even talk! What had gone wrong? We had just checked her into the hospital the other night and she had been told she just had Swine Flu, and a slight urinary infection. Swine flu couldn't have made her that sick. Neither could a Urinary infection. She was put into the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) at Fairview Ridges. Hours and hours went by, while they did tests, blood tests and x-rays. More long hours had gone on and still no answer to what she had. There's no way to explain how we were feeling. It was the most nerve racking situation I had even been in, and never want to have to go through again. They had finally finished and said that she had gotten a (bacterial infection). Then later found out, it was a type of staph infection. The thing that gets to me is that she was completely healthy and something like this out of no-where happened. She had gone through many ups and downs, she couldn’t talk, and she couldn’t read, she couldn’t write, she could barely breathe. I never knew how bad an infection could get. Many people die from staph infections, debating on how bad it gets. The infection made her whole immune system and all her organs to just break down slowly. The infection slowly eats away parts of your body and then they don’t work as well as they did before. She was moved to different rooms throughout the months at Fairview, still in ICU. She was given the breathing tube to help her breathing come more regularly. They had taken it out 4 to 5 times thinking that she would be able to breathe on her own but then we were let down when by the end of the night they would have to reoperrate and put it in. Every other 2 weeks they would switch off doctors, which I never knew, and there was one that we really liked. His name was Doctor Billman. He was very on top of things, and let us know everything new that was going on and how she was doing. He had told us that it's rare that something like this happens and someone is strong enough to get through it. After those two weeks she was given a new doctor. Doctor Billman had been there for us throughout it all though. The next month or so, she was up and eating solid foods, with the breathing tube out. We thought that she would be out of the hospital in no time. That night, she had an aneurysm. Her aneurysm had caused a rupture. She had been bleeding internally. She had lost 70% of blood, and was given a 50% chance of surviving the surgery. Luckily, she had gotten through it. Her body had clotted it herself; if it wouldn't have they wouldn't have had a way to stop it themselves. The surgeon had said that when they had cut her open they had just been shocked to see that she had clogged it by herself. It was nice hearing that. After that, they had moved her back into ICU because she still was having troubles with her breathing. So, again they had put her on the breathing tube. She had been doing well for awhile but then bad luck started in again. Her heart rate had gotten to 175. Dr Billman had become her doctor again and he was shocked that she was still in Fairview. He had called the U of M and had gotten her sent over there as fast as he could for open heart surgery. The next morning she was sent to the U of M and was put into the ICU there. We had called the whole family and let them know that she would be having heart surgery the following morning from 6 AM to 4 PM. They had told us that she would be getting her one valve replaced, because it was so bad that it was basically just hanging on barely. That morning we had all arrived there, almost at the same time. Dr Billman had been standing there waiting for us letting us know that he was there for us, not just as a doctor, but as a friend. Before the surgery they had told us that they were going to be replacing not one but three of the heart valves because almost all of them had been damaged from the infection. The surgery had gone faster than they had expected. They had replaced all three of the heart valves, and had found 6 liters of extra fluid that had been surrounding her heart. We had then found out that was what was giving her such a hard time with breathing. She was put into one of the ICU rooms at the U of M to just recover and get in good shape before anything else happened. She had been in that ICU for a couple weeks before she was sent to a regular room. She was trained to walk, read, write, and talk all over again. It's amazing to see how much a human body can handle, and how she had recovered from something that deadly.

posted by Amira @ 7:37 PM