Deborah Waller

My mother passed away on April 30th, 2024 after 48-hour battle in the hospital with sepsis. My mother started complaining of abdominal pain on April 27th in the afternoon after we went out to lunch. Shortly after we returned home from running errands and grabbing lunch at Kerby’s Coney Island, my mother started vomiting on and off until later in the evening. Initially, she thought, she may have gotten food poisoning.

Shortly after midnight on April 28th, my mother passed out getting up to go to the bathroom. She was extremely pale and had no strength to get up. I immediately called 9-11. The Fire Department took her to the nearest hospital 3 miles from our house. When they brought her into the E.R to the ambulance triage area, her blood pressure was 63/36, heart rate 140 BPM, and pulse ox was 89%. She was alert, but very critically ill, and the ER doctor decided to take her to the Trauma/Resuscitation eoom, where she could receive critical care before being taken up to the ICU. Within a half hour, the ER doctor came out to tell me my mother was in septic shock.

My mother’s blood pressure was still low in the ICU, even with the help of vasopressors. Around 4 am on April 29th, I received a call from the ICU critical care physician assistant that mother’s blood pressure, heart rate, and pulse ox were very low, and she was also becoming disoriented, and they had to intubate my mother and put her on a ventilator. The general surgeon came in and emergently boarded my mother for an exploratory laparotomy to remove her entire colon. She got out of surgery, and was now in the surgical ICU on a vent with an open abdomen packed with a wound vac, as they were going to take her back to surgery to following morning to close her up.

The surgeon called us back into the hospital around 1:00 am on April 30th to say, they needed to go back into surgery, as my mother’s lab results did not come back good. When we got to her surgical ICU room, the surgical team, along with the general surgeon were there waiting for us, but my mom was dying from sepsis, and her heart was getting weak, and kidneys were shutting down right in front of our eyes. Surgery was not going to help her we all decided, and my mother passed away peacefully surrounded with us family by her said at 3:50 am on April 30th, 2024.

Source: Adam Waller, Son