Narrative Essay - Reborn

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I then asked Mimi what the doctor had told her about the illness. The doctor had told her that it was like her body was fighting this intruder, and when “help” finally came, help being the antibiotics, the cells were like “Yes, please help!”, and stopped fighting, which caused them to burst, and all the poisons from them were released into her body. They performed CPR for over ten minutes as well as jolting her numerous times with the defibrillator before they were finally able to get a heartbeat. They had to put her on a ventilator, which is similar to a respirator, but is more intense. The purpose of the ventilator was to “rattle” the chest. The doctor had also said her lungs were like wet tissue paper. Between the oxygen and the ventilator, her oxygen level was only 53%. It should be 100%. She had over seventeen bags of various medicines/vitamins, etc., feeding into her femoral artery intravenously. The doctors/nurses worked on her all through the night. It took eight days to be able to wean her from the ventilator and another two days before she could go home.

Three months later she started experiencing pains in multiple random parts of her body, including her stomach, her legs, her head, etc. They ran tests and knew she had an infection somewhere but they didn’t know where. Finally, her headaches got so painful that even migraine medicine and Vicodin didn’t relieve any of the pain she was experiencing. Megan had explained the pain by saying even the sound of someone texting on the other side of the room was enough to put her headaches over the top. The doctors did a MRI on her head and found that she had ten brain abscesses located all throughout her brain. They performed a surgery that involved cutting the top of her head from one ear to the other ear, “peeling” her face down, and cutting into the skull to perform a biopsy on one of the abscess in her frontal lobe. They found she had two different infections: peptostreptococcus and fusobacterium. They also found she had a vegetation dangling into her aortic valve, so they medevacked her to the Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia. They treated her brain abscesses as well as the “infected” vegetation with a three month long course of intravenous antibiotics which was administered every either hours through a pic line. They had to perform one more brain surgery, as the abscess in the front of her brain “grew a baby” and was causing the vertex of the brain to shift. Obviously, this had to be removed.

The doctors explained that they believed the vegetation was created by her sepsis, and that tiny pieces of the vegetation (which was infected from her sepsis) had broken off and followed the vein until it stopped, and the infected particle would lodge there and create the pain. In the brain it created abscesses. They performed case studies on this, because the only way the abscesses could have been scattered throughout her brain, the way they were, was for the infections to have come from the heart. However, the infections were non-aerobic, which means non-oxygen loving, and the heart is oxygen rich. To this day, Megan’s case study is being discussed and argued by experienced doctors.

Megan was eventually completely cured and could go back to living a normal nine-year old’s life at school with her friends. Megan could play sports and do everything any kid could do. She did have to revisit the hospital for annual checkups, but just last year marked her final checkup. Megan currently attends Pittsburgh University with a major in neuroscience. The day Megan was “reborn” will forever be in our families heart, December 19th 2007.