Around the middle of 2011 I started having issues with vertigo. Local ENT doctors did many exams and sent me to the hearing center at Vanderbilt. I was diagnosed with BPPV and came home for treatment here. The vertigo eventually led to near blackouts and so my cardiologist wanted to update my existing pacemaker that had been in my chest for 22 years. About one week after the pacemaker implant the area around the incision became infected with red blisters. I went back to see the Surgeon that performed the surgery. After he examined me in his office he said he had no idea what was wrong. He sent me across the hall to my Cardiologists office. He sat me in a chain in the hallway, not even checking my b/p and said “Mr. Jennings, you don’t need to worry, you will be fine.” He sent me home. A couple of days later my brother came to pick me up for church. When he came in and saw me I was almost unconscious. He rushed me to the ER. My brother had taken me to the ER about 2 in the afternoon. After several tests and xrays had been done I recall the ER doctor at Takoma saying that they needed to send me to Holston Valley, a larger hospital about 40 miles away. I knew that I felt bad but I didn’t think I was sick enough to have to go by ambulance to Kingsport so I asked him if it was really necessary. He sat on a stool and scooted up to my bed. He said in a very kind voice, “Mr. Jennings, your kidneys have quit and you have C-diff. If you don’t go you will be dead before midnight.” Earlier my pastor had come to pray for me and all my family had come down to the ER. It didn’t dawn on me that they had been called in for the ER doctor didn’t think I would live to get to Holston Valley.
I was conscious during the Ambulance ride and even managed to text my Sister-in-law and told her that they thought I was dying. I recall them taking me from the Ambulance directly to the ICU where several Doctors and Nurses were waiting for me in the room. They feverishly started hooking me up to IV’s and wires and gave me something in the IV to knock me out. I found out later that I was delirious and was fighting them so they had to knock me out to save my life. That was the last memory I had until 11 days later. I had been in a coma and on a ventilator. During those 11 days I was taken down to surgery to remove the infected pacemaker and removal of the wires by laser that had been in for so many years. I literally died on 3 different occasions during the 3 days after surgery. I was placed on dialysis and my family was being notified by phone on an hourly basis. They was told that I had septic shock and ARDS. They gave me a 2% chance of living and my family had been told that they should start considering funeral arraignments.
I want to back up a little bit. About 1 month before I got the pacemaker my Mom suffered a major stroke. She was hospitalized and eventually sent to a nursing home. She couldn’t speak, eat or drink. Although she was aware of her surroundings she simply could not communicate. Mom and Dad had been married 54 years at this time. A few days after I got the new pacemaker I recall going to the nursing home and telling Mom about how excited I was about the new technology that this pacemaker had. She was able to move one arm and she gently reached up and touch my cheek as if to say that she was happy about this too.
Now back to where I left off. I can’t imagine what my poor Dad must have been going through with his wife dying from a stroke and now his oldest son dying from Sepsis.
By God’s Grace, I did pull through and I woke up and was removed from the Ventilator and placed in a step down room of the ICU. I would be there through Christmas and discharged about 7 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, 2011.
It would take years for me to realize the damage that had been done to my brain (literally) and to learn that I would never be the same person that I was before. Eventually I did recover and a year later they decided to give me another pacemaker. Noone told me that I needed to take it easy after the surgery so within 3 days I was using a chainsaw to cut down some hedges that had overgrown next to my trailer. The next day my chest was feeling weird so I drove myself back to Takoma ER. The did a CT and tests and came to the conclusion that I must have pulled a muscle in my chest, gave me some muscle relaxers and sent me home. The next morning about 7 a.m. I got a phone call from a nurse in the ER at Takoma. She first asked me how I was feeling. I thought this was very unusual for a nurse to be following up from my ER visit. She proceeded to tell me that my CT had been misread the night before and that I needed to get to my Cardiologist as fast as I could. I didn’t ask why so I got my cousin to drive me to Kingsport to his office. Before we got there I got another call saying I needed to bypass the cardiologist’s office and go directly to the ER at Holston Valley. Gosh I thought what in the world is going on here. When we got to the ER we were standing in line to register when I got another phone call saying that I need to go directly up to the ICU where I had been before and bypass the ER.
When I arrived in the ER once again, there was several medical personnel standing at a room where they led me into. They asked me to take my shirt off a lay on the bed on my left side. A nurse was sitting at a machine beside the bed and immediately started placing gel on my chest and started a test. You could have heard a pin drop in that room with about 9 people in there. The nurse using the machine said in a low, trembling voice that my heart was surrounded by blood and that I had pericarditis. The doctor had them quickly hook me up to IV’s and ordered them to send me down to surgery, STAT. The last thing I recall was being on the surgery table and a huge machine with a LONG needle looking device coming down towards the center of my chest. At that moment I was put under.
When I awoke, I had a tube coming from out of the center of my chest. I found out that when I was using the chainsaw that I pulled one of the pacemaker wires out of my heart and blood had slowly started pooling around my heart. I had surgery to place the wire back into my heart and sent back to the ICU. I had in all 900cc’s of blood that they drained out. I was in ICU 5 days and recovered and sent home. Once again, God had been faithful as my healer. It has taken years for me to realize just how drastically my life was affected by these 2 ICU stays.
I’m so glad I found a community of survivors of the ICU and survivors of ARDS. Hearing their stories and struggles made me realize my symptoms that had lingered for years was not imagined but VERY REAL.