Leaving university I started working for the Belgian National Radio as a journalist. I used to travel a lot and produce radio features about life abroad and how people all over the world dealt with the different challenges in society. A privileged job that I enjoyed doing for many years. In the meantime, I got married and became a mother of two sons. Nothing to worry about, so it seemed, until January 30, 2009. I had been fighting the symptoms of flu for some days. Instead of recovering, I began to feel worse and worse: I had a high fever, was asleep most of the time, could barely eat or drink, and had to cough a lot. The general practitioner sent me to hospital. A few hours later, I had to be reanimated. It was a close call: I was infected by the Streptococcus pyogenes bacteria. My blood started thickening, my organs stopped functioning, and I went into a septic shock, followed by a cardiac arrest. I was successfully reanimated, but still not stable. For 10 days, I was fighting to survive at the intensive care unit (ICU), with several cardiac arrests and reanimations, some of which were long-lasting. The Head of the ICU informed my husband that there was less than 5% chance to survive and if so, he could not predict what kind of damage there would be: the amount of drugs that I had been given, including noradrenaline, was so extremely high, that it became very unclear how my body would respond to it. And if, as by miracle, I would survive: what kind of damage would there be? Physical? Mental? Physical and mental? No specialist could answer those questions. But both the health care professionals and my family fought to keep me alive.

Article published online:
11 July 2024

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