About That Time I Almost Died

hi i'm pete and welcome to just a few acres farm i have a story to tell in this video and it's about that one time i almost died it happened right down there this happened in 2014 it was our second year of farming i remember we didn't have a lot of animals yet i think we had three head of cattle we had two boxes full of broiler chickens and maybe 25 or so layer hens and it was in the spring i think it was in april and hillary and i had come down to the woods here to continue making firewood out of three maple trees and the stumps you can see right here of those maple trees we cut them down in the woods we parted them into logs and then we pulled them up the hill with a chain on the tractor out into the field to make them into firewood now the importance of this place we were cutting wasn't lost on me because i never forget where my grandfather died which was right up there on the top of the hill he cut a tree that was on the edge of the woods and a limb that hang out into the field acted like a spring when the tree came down and it thrusts the trunk back into him and it killed him and we were very near where that had happened but the way i was almost killed is not the way you would think not from cutting wood and having something fall on me but rather we were out here in the field cutting up the logs into chunks of firewood i cut into one log and the piece of firewood came free and the log ever so slowly and gently rolled down this hill and bumped me in the shin i didn't think anything of it we continued cutting wood and went in for the evening and when i changed out of my work clothes i found i had a little scratch about that long on my shin it looked like the kind of scratch you'd get from a berry bush about a week went by and one evening i was sitting at the kitchen counter with a pair of shorts on and hillary happened to notice that there was some redness around that little scratch and she was alarmed her history being as a critical care nurse she kind of knew what was going on and i guess i did too because i'd stepped on nails when i was working on the house and one time i'd gotten an infection and it got right around the infection so we decided that i should go to the doctor i went to the doctor a few days later and he drew a circle around where it was red with a magic marker because he wanted to make sure it didn't spread he prescribed some antibiotics and i went on my way i felt fine there was no pain there three days went by and the redness continued to grow outside the boundaries of the marked circle that the doctor had drawn so on a saturday i decided it was time to go to our local convenient care because i couldn't see my regular doctor then got in to see another doctor there which i had never met before she prescribed a different antibiotic i got the antibiotic and went home still the red spot got bigger and bigger and i figured well it'll take a couple days for the antibiotic to take effect hillary and i were at lunch the following monday when i started to not feel so good all of a sudden while i was eating lunch i started to feel feverish i had the chills my heart started beating faster i started to breathe faster hillary looked at me and said i looked like a ghost all of the color had drained from my face she was freaking out but i wasn't i figured i'd caught a little bug and that was it she said we're going right to the doctor this time we went to see the doctor that i'd seen the first time around i told him about my experience at the convenient care place on that previous saturday he kind of scratched his head at the antibiotic i'd been put on as if to say that won't do a darn thing looked at the red spot went out to consult the other doctors that were outside the exam room came back in and said go to the emergency room right away hillary drove me to the emergency room which is about a half hour away and wouldn't you know when we got there they were full they brought me in and triaged me took my vital signs and sent me back to the waiting room by this time i was getting really bad i was hyperventilating my heart was racing i was sweating profusely well little did i know that they'd sent me back to the waiting room so that they could hurry up and set up a bed in the hallway outside of the er so they could bring me in they brought me back to the bed that they'd set up which was really just a couch that was kind of folded down put a blanket on me drew some blood and sent it off for an expedited review meanwhile i was hyperventilating i couldn't catch my breath i felt like i was uh drowning or couldn't breathe even though i was breathing really fast i could feel my heart pounding through my chest the blood test results came back and i was septic sepsis is deadly pretty quickly it's your body basically attacking itself trying to kill an infection that it can't control your white blood cell count goes through the roof and it's basically a last defense for your body before you die they couldn't tell right away what i was infected with so they just started throwing intravenous antibiotics at it heavy doses of multiple types i got a bed actually in the er later that evening it was like living through a one long fever dream i can't remember big parts of it and talking to hillary later on at that point i could have easily died my organs were starting to shut down hillary stayed with me until i got a room upstairs in the hospital out of the er at around midnight or one o'clock she had to go home we had three small children and since hillary was an icu nurse she had a hawkeye for how they were treating me looking at each type of medication they were giving me reading the blood test reports and making sure that they weren't missing anything i'm so thankful for that through the night and into the middle of the next day my white blood cell count continued to rise and white blood cell count as the indicator of sepsis when that starts to go down you start to come out of the woods i was in the woods for a long time but the afternoon of the second day i started to get better i spent a total of four days in the hospital and you got to be pretty seriously sick to spend that much time in the hospital these days during that time they took ultrasounds of the area where the infection started they took loads of blood tests and they could never really figure out exactly what the infection was but they suspected it was mrsa or something closely related to mrsa my family came to visit me every day hillary was there all day my parents came and my three kids who were very little came and i'll never forget what my son henry gave me when he came he was just six years old and he gave me this plastic coin ever since the day he gave it to me i've kept it by my bed in our bedroom at the end of day four they let me out of the hospital they took me off of the iv antibiotics my white blood cell count had come down enough for them to feel comfortable they gave me a slew of antibiotics to take for the next month while i was at home to make sure that the infection didn't come back and i was really weak luckily our farm was a lot smaller and it was such that hillary could take care of the animals but it was still quite a load on her when i left the hospital i had no clue what was to come next and that was actually the worst part of the whole thing that kept me sick for the better part of a year i contracted c diff now c diff is a bacteria that lives in your gut lots of bacteria live in your gut and help with digestion c diff is normally harmless but when you take all these antibiotics and you bomb your system it kills off all the bacteria in your gut c diff is one of the few that stay alive and if you get too much of it you get very sick in the absence of the other bacteria that normally control its population so i started losing weight i was tired all the time whatever i ate ran right through me and it was basically kind of incurable they would put me on a round of one antibiotic to take care of the c diff it would take care of it for a little while it would come back and put me on a different antibiotic this took the better part of a year to finally come out of so what happened after i recovered was i a changed man in the movies of course the character would say carpe diem seized the day and he would go around and hug his family and remember that every day live life to your fullest well this is real life i didn't feel that way at all the one thing that i did realize is that no matter what you do and farming can be dangerous business but all it took was a little scratch and i could have gotten that little scratch any one of a thousand ways on the farm any day you walk out your door there's no guarantee that you're gonna come home at night and i guess that was something i knew to begin with i you know i've i've heard people say oh i had a near-death experience and i came out with this giant revelation well life just went on i saw kurt vonnegut the famous author speak once i was right in the front row and he drew a line on the chalkboard and he said now this is how a book goes plot goes like this there's a climax and then there's a down and then there's a slight climax toward the end and end of story well this is what life is like i think that's what happened i wish there was a better mortal to the story but hey it's an interesting story nonetheless have a great weekend and i'll see you next time

Channel: Just a Few Acres Farm

Views: 97,494

Rating: 4.9721155 out of 5

Keywords: farm, farming, hobby farm, hobby farm guys, hobby farming for profit, homestead, how farms work, just a few acres farm, life on a farm, i almost died, about that time i almost died, sepsis infection, mrsa, life changing event

Id: DW8O_PoWPSk

Length: 10min 12sec (612 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 06 2021