Sepsis – It’s Likely Not What You Think It Is (free issue)
Sepsis kills and injures more people than you may know
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Next month, September, is Sepsis Awareness Month. I wanted to share it now in case there is anyone here who would like to help spread the message.
I began working with Sepsis Alliance over 13 years ago. It was a very small organization back then and they were looking for someone who could write about infections. They needed help to educate people about this serious condition that so few people knew about, let alone understood. They got me. 😊 My role as a contractor changed over the years as their team expanded and I’m not as hands-on anymore, but I’m proud of how far the organization and the site have come.
Do you know what sepsis is?
If you don’t know what sepsis is, you definitely aren’t alone. You may have heard of blood poisoning though. That is what people used to call sepsis. Or you may have been told that sepsis is an infection, like getting sepsis in your lungs or gallbladder. Neither of these descriptions is correct however.
“If you don’t know what sepsis is, you definitely aren’t alone.”
Sepsis is your whole body’s toxic reaction to any kind of infection. For unknown reasons, as your immune system starts to fight the infection, it also starts to fight against itself. If not diagnosed and treated quickly enough, sepsis can progress to septic shock and death. Sepsis kills about 350,000 adults in the U.S. every year. And it leaves many more with severe, life-altering changes, like amputations, kidney failure, and more.
Sometimes people tell me that they don’t know anyone who had sepsis. But when I ask if they knew anyone who died from pneumonia, the flu, a urinary tract infection, or any other type of infection, they almost always say yes. That was sepsis.
People have developed sepsis from something as simple as an infected bug bite or paper cut. Others became ill from more extensive infections like pneumonia or peritonitis. No one is immune to getting sepsis, but we don’t yet know why some get it and others don’t. Two people may get the same infection; one may develop sepsis and go into septic shock, while the other doesn’t.
Because we don’t know why some get sepsis and some don’t, we need to focus on prevention. We need to prevent infections, the cause of sepsis.
Educating the public
Getting the message out about an illness that most people don’t know about is tough. When Sepsis Alliance did its first survey, before I was on board, only 19% of adults in the U.S. knew what the word meant. As the founder, Carl Flatley, DDS, MSD, often says, when he typed “sepsis” in a Microsoft Word document, it was flagged as a spelling error. We decided that sepsis needed a monthly observance. We declared September to be Sepsis Awareness Month. The following year, the Global Sepsis Alliance, of which Sepsis Alliance is a founding member, announced September 13th World Sepsis Day.
Thanks to the generosity of a board member, we also began hosting a wonderful event in New York City, the Sepsis Heroes Gala. It ran for several years and was a wonderful reason it was to get all dressed up!
I was asked sometimes why we needed to raise sepsis awareness. My response always was, how can you prevent something or advocate for yourself if you don’t know a disease or condition even exists? Knowledge truly is power.
We started small, but the drive to increase awareness grew fast. Now, hospital systems, companies, and members of the community work to help us teach others about what sepsis is, how to prevent it, how to recognize it, and how to cope after the diagnosis.
Another essential aspect of sepsis awareness is ensuring that sepsis survivors are seen and heard. When we started a section on the site called Faces of Sepsis™, we did it so survivors and those who lost someone to sepsis could share their experiences with others. We thought we’d get a few hundred contributions. We now have almost 2000.
At first, the consistent message that came through was that many contributors thought they were alone. They had never heard of sepsis. They didn’t know anyone who had sepsis. And they didn’t know who they could talk to about their horrible experience of being so ill.
“… the contributors thought they were alone.”
Since then, we also learned about what we coined post-sepsis syndrome. While many sepsis survivors pick up where they left off before they became ill, so many others are left with lasting effects, ranging from the obvious (amputations) to the not-so-obvious (post-traumatic stress disorder).
Help raise sepsis awareness
If you want to get involved in raising sepsis awareness, Sepsis Alliance offers tools from ideas and graphics to share with others to information on how to get your state to declare a Sepsis Awareness Month Proclamation.
There is still much work to be done, and Sepsis Alliance has grown to try to address the many needs. The organization now offers multiple educational activities through the Sepsis Alliance Institute and virtual conferences and summits, as well as a virtual support community for people affected by sepsis through Sepsis Alliance Connect.
I’m proud to play a role in increasing sepsis awareness and possibly saving lives.
Have you or someone you know had sepsis? Please leave your comments below. Let’s get a conversation going.
On a completely different topic – it seems I was ahead of the game with my piece on if nursing practitioners should be called “Dr. N. Practitioner.” (Can Nurses Ever Be Called Doctors?). Recently, the Washington Post wrote about the same thing, Medicine without doctors? State laws are changing who treats patients. I wish I could take credit!
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I once had a patient on a med-surgical unit who had sepsis because of cellulitis on her leg. It was horrible. It is something that needs to be educated and I’m glad to know September is going to be Sepsis awareness month. Also, on the other topic of should we call our nurse practitioner doctor, well, my two cents is that I go see a nurse practitioner for my doctor because I live in the US and Insurance is way too costly for me to see an MD. I am tired of living in a country that doesn’t care about it citizens.