A mother who woke up to find she was a quadruple amputee after going to the hospital with the flu has spoken out.
Kristen Fox, 42, from Poland, Ohio, was 38 when she came down with the flu just before the Covid-19 pandemic began in March 2020.
She had visited the emergency room with a sore throat and was sent home with the medication Tamiflu when tests revealed she had the flu, but found her condition kept worsening until she became so unwell she couldn't even get off the couch.
The mother-of-two was then found to have developed sepsis and was put in an induced coma to help her body recover, but needed to have all four of her limbs removed to save her life.
Fox has now spoken out about the ordeal, telling People: "I was on my couch and my best friend texts me. She's like, 'How do you feel?' And I had texted her back. I said, 'I feel like I'm dying' - and that was the last text she got from me."
Two hours later, the high school assistant principal got in touch with another friend who works as a nurse, who came to her house, checked her vitals, and rushed her back to the hospital, less than 24 hours after she'd first been.
Fox recalled that she was taken to the emergency room and the last thing she remembers is going to triage, and nothing after that.
She had gone into septic shock from sepsis, which is a serious condition where the body responds improperly to an infection, causing it to turn on itself. Septic shock can cause a dramatic drop in blood pressure which can cause damage to organs including the lungs, kidneys, and liver, and if not caught early enough can even cause death, according to the Mayo Clinic.
According to the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), around 1.7 million people in the US develop sepsis each year, of which 270,000 died from the infection.
Fox added to the outlet: "They put me in a medically induced coma. I was already turning purple," adding that medics kept saying that something was masking an infection in her body, but nobody mentioned sepsis until the following day.
Medics were also told to "prepare for some limb loss" as she had to be given so many vasopressors, drugs that constrict and make blood vessels narrower, which are given to people with low blood pressure to help bring it up.
While the medication can be life-saving in cases of septic shock, where the blood pressure drops drastically, vasopressors can also sometimes cause a lack of blood supply to certain areas of the body, including the upper and lower limbs.
Fox explained: "So they thought I was going to lose a couple of toes or fingers, nothing like what I lost."
Doctors were forced to amputate her legs below the knees of March 27, but found the condition of her arms was also worsening, so they were also amputated below the elbows on April 6, three days before Fox's 39th birthday, which she spent in a medically induced coma.
She explained how surreal it was to not only find that she'd been in an induced coma after attending hospital with the flu, becoming a quadruple amputee, and then waking up to be faced with a global pandemic which meant medics were dressed up in extreme PPE.
Fox revealed: "I woke up with no arms and legs. I woke up and people were like, mask, a shield, goggles. Like I was like, holy Lord. I had no idea what had happened."
Despite the challenges of her new reality, Fox knew she had no choice but to adapt to life as a quadruple amputee, revealing: "There's nothing that's gonna change this. I'm never going to get my arms and legs back.
"So it was fight or flight, instantly. That has been the ultimate thing that has carried me through this - I realized from the first moment that it happened, my life is forever changed."
She was able to leave the hospital weeks later to continue her recovery at home, and see her children - son Landon, then nine, and daughter Laiken, then seven - for the first time since she was admitted, but kept her arms wrapped up as the experience was already so overwhelming for them.
Fox also revealed that the ambulance driver who was taking her home kindly stopped at a gas station mid-way through the drive to allow her children, who were in the car behind with her husband, to spend another 20 minutes with her to settle them down.
After returning home, Fox underwent 12 weeks of intensive physiotherapy for three hours a day at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Rehabilitation Institute in Pennsylvania, to help her live independently again.
One of her major driving factors was being able to be there for her children, and she remains grateful she is alive despite the odds.
"I have to conquer this because I have to be a mom for my kids," she said. "They could have mourned my death. They didn't. I have to go and fight and kick a** in this therapy every single day to be the mom they need me to be."
Since then, Fox has gone back to her job at Northeast Ohio Impact Academy, which she also wanted to do to teach the children she works with a vital lesson about resilience in the face of adversity.
Featured image credit: Robert Daly/Getty Images
