On Friday, I was FaceTiming my very sexy boyfriend (a necessary detail) and I started to joke, “This time last semester I was…” But before I could even finish my sentence, he cut me off. 

“No! Don’t say it!” he exclaimed, as if saying it would open Pandora’s satanic box all over again. 

I laughed and said it anyway because it’s true: on the first Friday of the Spring semester, I was hospitalized with sepsis, and would be twice more.

On a Friday in January, doctors found bacteria in my bloodstream and diagnosed me with sepsis, an extreme full-body response to the infection spreading throughout my body, which can be life-threatening.  

Doctors deduced that the bitch that’d double crossed me was my port-a-cath, the implanted device that I rely on for my life sustaining medication. It’s something cancer patients use for frequent IV access. I stick a big-ass needle into my chest to access a tube going to my heart. Some normal bacteria on the skin latched onto the plastic Port as their host and gradually grew, slowly infecting me. 

You may be wondering, “Catherine, what’s this five-star experience like?” Picture yourself on 24/7 IV drips of antibiotics with fatigue so crushing you’re basically Tom Cruise pulling Top Gun 10 G’s, waiting for the antibiotics to clap back against the bacteria. 

Back at school, I was sending out mass emails to all my professors like, “I know we’re just getting to know each other, but I’m in the hospital and not sure when I’ll get out.” I wasn’t prepared for the ensuing five month sepsis saga that went a little something like this:

January: I Zoom into classes from my hospital bed. I’m only released after fighting with my doctors over removing the port. They wanted to preserve it hoping the at-home IV antibiotics would eliminate the infection. I wanted that fucker out, but they refused.

February: I drag myself to classes only to crash again 24 hours after finishing my antibiotics.

March: I’m septic again and hospitalized at a different hospital where my cardiologist promptly slices out the infected port. He places a peripherally inserted central catheter instead. I’m discharged with more at-home IV antibiotics, relieved to spend time at home recuperating. 

A week later, it’s April, and the fever returns. This time I’m not taking any chances. We yank the PICC out and my crumbling body collapses into spring break. Finally…

HAH, YOU THOUGHT THIS SHIT WAS OVER? Without skipping a beat, the last day of finals in May my body gives out and I’m hospitalized again for a major lupus flare.

Recently, I learned one of my improv classmates thought I was just a too-cool-for-school kid who “rolled up whenever I wanted,” when really I was an infected meat sack masking it all with a smile. My smile hid the eight hours a day I spent resting in my room only to use the energy I’d saved up to take a shower. It hid the weeks of nausea when I only ate saltines and ginger ale and the dropping two inches in my pants size. It hid weeks of disassociation with reality and crippling anxiety as I lived in constant fear of another hospitalization if I were to attempt anything that brought me joy. As a result, I have very little memory of those five months. 

During these five months, my mom and boyfriend traded weekends from San Diego to Los Angeles to help me function. For months those closest to me took my teary phone calls, remaining strong for me when I couldn’t take it anymore. Teachers, nurses, my talk therapist, physical therapists, doctors and OSAS case managers helped carry me along. Despite all the love, I feel guilty saying I still had days, weeks, months, of feeling hopeless and alone. 

Now, on the other side of all that suffering, I learned that everything else in life can wait for your health. Your worth is not dependent on how productive you are, it is based on the kind of person you are. Your thoughts are not your reality. Take an incomplete, or three, like me. Your friends, family, doctors and school will understand. If they don’t, I always will. You are doing enough. You are enough. Just as you are today, the next day, and so on. 

As to why I didn’t drop out? It’s because doctors assured me I’d rebound quickly with my antibiotics, and around every corner I sincerely believed that the finish line was in sight. We all did.

But my semester of sepsis was also like living in a slow motion car crash, and asking why I didn’t drop out would be like asking a person who got in a car crash, “Why did you get in the car?” because that’s the thing with chronic illness, you’re constantly at the whim of your body, it comes with the gig. When the inevitable happens, you’re forced to march forward. Yet, despite the trauma of my spring semester, I never gave up. I refused to. Even on my darkest days I chose to fight on –– a phrase I unironically latched onto during this time. 

I tell this story to highlight the unnoticed disabled student experience on campus. I owe my Spring semester to my support system. I’m so fucking proud of myself. And with that, BITCH IT’S MY SENIOR YEAR, I MADE IT!! YOU WON’T BREAK MY SOULLLL!!! 

Catherine Ames is a senior writing about life as a young person coexisting with chronic illness in her column “Chronically Catherine.”

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