Roberta Alisauskaite (27) started feeling sick in October, but thought she had simply caught a seasonal virus at work. In addition to her cold-like symptoms, she said she recently suffered from an abscess in her wisdom tooth and was taking antibiotics to reduce the swelling, reports .
Over the next few days, the young woman’s symptoms worsened: she started coughing, shaking, and her temperature rose sharply. However, as a mother of two sons – Sean (8) and Koby (6) – she managed to overcome herself to take care of them. However, when she started sweating uncontrollably while dropping off the children at school on October 20, she went back to bed.
“I was curled up in bed with the heating on but I was shaking. I started to feel a bit confused. I took off my clothes and got in a cold shower to cool off because I felt like I was on fire,” said the mum from Wales. When the boys came back from school and went to check on her, mom was just babbling. She soon became completely unresponsive, which terrified her children.
Roberta only remembers waking up in the hospital hours later after the elder Sean called 911. Doctors told Roberta that she had developed sepsis, a condition where the body’s immune system overreacts to an infection and attacks its own tissues and organs, and went into septic shock, which is a severe form of sepsis in which the blood pressure drops dangerously.
Roberta claims she almost died in front of her children and both sons were left traumatized by the experience. According to the UK Sepsis Trust, sepsis is an emergency and early recognition of symptoms can save a life.
Symptoms of sepsis in adults may include: slurred, slurred speech or confusion, extreme tremors or muscle pain, no urine production (for a whole day), severe shortness of breath, feeling like you are “going to die” or mottled or pale skin.
At the hospital, Roberta underwent a chest X-ray, a CT scan and an ultrasound in order for the doctors to find the source of the infection, but they were unsuccessful. Her body temperature in the hospital reached 40.2 °C. Although she was released on October 23, the exact cause is not confirmed. The consultant believes that a combination of a cold (perhaps covid type) and an infection in the tooth may have caused this reaction. Her doctor later confirmed that there are cases of sepsis where the exact location can never be located.
Roberta is now trying to spread awareness about the symptoms of sepsis. “As mothers, we just kind of manage because we have children to take care of. We always try to keep our teeth down. If they had left me like this a little longer, I could have died. It’s hard to look back because that day could have ended very differently,” she concluded.
