Big Update

This is going to be long, but here is my big update about everything that has happened in the past month.

First off, my surgery on April 22nd was my 5th surgery this year alone. My body was already run down, tired, and still healing from the first 4 surgeries I had.

So, on April 22nd, I went and had my surgery to insert the Spinal Cord Stimulator into my back (in between my shoulder blades) and the battery box into my right hip.Everything went great and I was home within 2 days. While at home, I had a home health care nurse and occupational therapist come out 3 times a week. Nursing wise, everything looked fine. I was also on very strong anti-biotics, just to be on the safe side.
The following Friday, April 30th, I had an appt. to actually turn the SCS on, but when I did it didn't feel the same as it did when I had my trial surgery for the SCS. So, I turned it off and called the tech, and we scheduled to meet.
I was doing well. Going places, spending time with family. But, I wasn't back to my old self.
All that changed the day of May 5th. The following night, I went out to dinner with my mom, aunt, and grandmother. We went to Chili's to support their churchs' youth group. I remember that I came home and went to bed, feeling OK.
about 3am on Wednesday I woke up feeling HORRIBLE. I started running a fever, and I hurt all over and was in horrible pain. My fever kept climbing, so at 5am, I woke my mom and she figured out how sick I was. She took me to the closest ER which is only 10 min. away. They took me back immediatly, and my fever was 106.3 . My blood pressure was dangerously low. At this point I don't remember much of what they started doing for me. I know that they ran pretty much every test in the book. I had blood work (which showed I had an infection), a CT scan, x-rays, 2 spinal taps ( I remember being awake for both, and asking to be sedated and they didn't. Those hurt so bad, more than anything else did). I remember being asleep, and suddenly being woken up because I had several bags of ice placed all over my body because they couldn't get my fever to go down. It took almost 12 hours for my fever just to drop 2-3 degrees. It took 5 days before my temp. returned to normal.  After all tests had been run, they finally thought to look at my hip and back, where I had just had surgery. That's when the realized that I had developed sepsis ( a severe blood infection). I was transferred by ambulance to a different hospital, one the my neurosurgeon worked at. I had surgery exactly 2 weeks after I had my SCS put in, to take it out, and thus remove what was causing the infection.  I was placed in the ICU for 4 days, and was in and out of consciousness. I remember that I would start talking in my sleep, so they would sedate me.
I was eventually moved to a regular room, and was dismissed from the hospital 2 days later.
Looking back on everything and doing research, I'm glad I don't remember much. I learned that if sepsis is not treated quickly that people can die from it and in most cases people have alot of damage and trauma to their internal organs, but I have no lasting effects.

I go back to the neurosurgeon in August to discuss having the SCS put back in. The SCS is my only way to be able to get off all these pain meds.

After I got home, my mom told me that one of the tests showed that I have a deformation on my heart, and the Dr.'s told her to get me in to see a cardiologist. I saw her last week, and she did an EEG of my heart and it came out a little off, so tomorrow I am going in to have an Echo done of my heart and to get fitted to do a 24 hr Holter Moniter test. I'll get my results in a week.