I Told Everyone I Was Fine. I Almost Died.

I told everyone to go to work. I'm fine.

That's what I said. Some pain, nothing major, I'll be fine, go on with your day. As women do. We push it down, we tell everyone else to keep moving, and we figure whatever's happening will just pass.

An hour later, I called my son. I think we have to go to the emergency room.

It was my wedding anniversary, at the end of August. My vitals were fine when I checked in. They ran a scan and found a kidney stone — nothing more dramatic than that, as far as anyone knew. The plan was simple: push fluids through an IV to help flush it, then send me home to manage and pass it on my own.

That IV changed everything. I believe it's what pushed an infection that was already sitting in my kidney straight into my bloodstream. I went into septic shock right there in the hospital. I was in the OR within two hours of walking through those doors.

I was hallucinating. It was bad. It was genuinely a bad scene.

But that moment was the exception. Most of what was actually happening to me, I don't remember at all, because it was that serious.

A lot of people don't live to tell that story.

I did. And I don't think that was luck alone — though there was plenty of luck involved too. I believe the years I'd already spent taking care of myself, the way I ate, the way I moved, everything I'd already rebuilt in my own body, gave me the reserves to actually survive that and come back from it. Not everyone gets that.

Here's the part that still gets me, though. I'd never had a kidney stone before. If that IV hadn't triggered everything while I was still sitting in that hospital bed, I would have been sent home to manage a stone I had no reference point for. And if the pain had gotten worse, if a fever had set in, I don't think I would have known to take it seriously. I would have told myself I was fine, tried to push through it at home, told everyone I was fine. I might not have gone back to a hospital that had just released me, because I would've been convinced I was being dramatic.

I don't tell this story for sympathy. I tell it because I think about how many times in my life I've said "I'm fine" when I wasn't, and how close that habit came to costing me everything. We are so good at dismissing our own pain until it becomes undeniable. I almost didn't make it to the hospital in time because I spent the first hour of a medical emergency insisting I was okay.

I wasn't. And I'm still here to tell you that the next time your body is trying to tell you something, it's worth listening the first time, not the fifth.

xo

~Jess

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