What’s your name? Taylor Coffman.
Do you know where you are? The hospital.
What is the date? February 17, 2022.
Who’s the president? Biden.
What’s the capital of Canada? Uh-oh. Ottawa? Do Americans typically know that?
I tried to respond to my new internist, but the answers didn’t flow from me. Each one caused a stutter the size of Mariana Trench — and it terrified me.
Plus, I was twitching so badly, my arms were practically useless.
I’d been in the hospital for a month. Zach, my husband, was at home in our apartment taking care of my newborn baby with my mother. It wasn’t easy for them: small apartment, new baby, one bathroom, my life hanging in the balance.
,. They didn’t fully know what was wrong with me, except that everything was going wrong with me.
Four weeks earlier, I had my baby by C-section. Moments later, I was rushed into another surgery because my vitals started to plummet and I was bleeding out rapidly.
I didn’t even get to hold my baby. There was no skin-on-skin — only chaos, panic, and then I didn’t wake from my anesthesia. It was a living nightmare. I did wake up eventually, and four days after giving birth, I finally met my daughter before she went home — without me.
After having my baby, I endured three rounds of ICU intubation, multiple abdominal surgeries, a body full of blood clots, heart failure, and kidney failure with a dash of severe sepsis and pneumonia and a long list of other scary conditions I’d never want to Google. I was a forever-changed, half-dead person.
Once I was removed from the ventilator for the final time — and I was able to speak again — a rotating cast of doctors visited me every day, and told me different things about my condition. It felt like some absurdist theater play. I had practically the same conversation over and over and over in a spin cycle of frustration and a maze of murky next steps.
My case was especially challenging because I had so many bodily systems failing and that required a slew of doctors. I had a fetal maternal medicine team, residents, an internist, a cardiologist, a hematologist, a nephrologist, an infectious disease specialist, a pulmonologist, a surgical team and maybe a few others I’ve forgotten.
“I’m a project manager at my day job, and you all have got to get organized working across fields,” I complained to one of my many physicians. “Everyone is telling me something different.”
In response to my speaking up, my doctors finally put a text chain together so they could all communicate in one place.
It’s possible that text chain saved my life — and it may never have been created if I hadn’t said something.
