An Ohio woman has opened up about the rapid turn her life took after a bout of the flu led to her having all four limbs amputated.
Kristin Fox, from Poland, Ohio, was 38 years old when she came down with the flu in March 2020, just days before the world went into global lockdown.
She was sent home from urgent care with the antiviral medication Tamiflu, but her condition rapidly deteriorated.
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Speaking to People, she recalled lying on her couch the next day when she received a text from her best friend.
"She's like, 'How do you feel? And I had texted her back. I said, 'I feel like I'm dying' — and that was the last text she got from me," Fox said.
Feeling seriously ill, Fox reached out to a friend who is a nurse for help.
"She came and she's like, 'We gotta go'," Fox recalled.
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Fox was taken to the emergency room, where she was put in a medically induced coma.
It was determined she had developed sepsis; the body’s extreme response to an infection.
Without quick treatment, sepsis can lead to tissue damage, organ failure, and death.
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"I was already turning purple," Fox said. "They kept saying, 'Something's masking an infection', but no one said sepsis until the following day."
Fox was given vasopressors, a drug used to make blood vessels constrict, and was warned that she may lose some limbs due to the reduced blood supply to certain areas.
However, Fox had no idea how severe the limb loss was going to be.
"They thought I was going to lose a couple of toes or fingers," she said. "Nothing like what I lost."
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Just days after she first came down with the flu, Fox had her legs amputated below her knees.
A few days later, on 6 April, her arms were amputated just below the elbows.
"I 'celebrated' my 39th birthday on April 9 in a medically induced coma," the mom-of-two recalled.
"I woke up and people were like, mask, a shield, goggles. Like I was like, holy Lord. I had no idea what had happened."
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Fox was completely blindsided by the turn of events, but she acknowledged that she was 'never going to get [her] arms and legs back'.
"There's nothing that's gonna change this... So it was fight or flight, instantly. That has been the ultimate thing that has carried me through this — I realized from the first moment that it happened, my life is forever changed."
In the aftermath of her amputations, Fox went through 12 weeks of physical therapy for three hours a day, determined to do what she could so she could 'be a mom' for her kids.
"They could have mourned my death. They didn't. I have to go and fight and kick ass in this therapy every single day to be the mom they need me to be," she said.
As well as being motivated by her kids, Fox was also motivated by her job as an administrator in a school.
Noting she 'had a lot of young eyes' watching her, she knew that how she responded to her ordeal would 'ultimately determine the outcome of their mindset of it'.
"If I didn't respond well to the situation, I don't think they would have been as resilient to it," she said.
Emily Brown