2023-10-27 10:07:49
Davy and Anaïs are 35 years old and live in Haut-Rhin. In March 2023, their lives were turned upside down following Anaïs contracted influenza A. From then on, her illness progressed, leading her to intensive care, before three amputations. Her husband fights to raise awareness regarding flu vaccinations and disabilities.
Today, Davy, 35, is still marked by what he calls a “atypical story, because not everyone experiences it“. He lives in Pfetterhouse (Haut-Rhin), with his wife Anäis and their daughter Chloé, 4 years old. Recently, he was still an industrial pharmaceutical technician in Switzerland and she worked as a nursing assistant at the Altkirch hospital (Haut-Rhin). Rhine).
They had a normal life, until Anaïs contracted “influenza A“. The life of this couple then changes, almost overnight. From an infection that initially seems benign, the illness takes on a worrying scale. Anaïs first ends up in the emergency room, before suffering complications. She passes nearly fifty days in a coma and finally suffered several amputations.
Today, Anaïs is disabled, and Davy is both saddened and angry. He wants to first draw public attention to flu vaccination. Other objectives he has: to change the way people look at disability, at the same time as he fights for this new life he must lead. Testimony.
It all starts on March 6, 2023. “Anaïs consults a doctor, who diagnoses a simple flu,” Davy recalls. No other worries then, for the couple. Two days later, the situation has not been resolved according to the former employee of a company producing vaccines. “I come home from work. We spend some time together in front of the television. Anaïs feels tired and goes to bed at 8:30 p.m., before getting up 50 minutes later. When she wakes up, she feels really bad and wants to sleep on the sofa. I am alerted by this approach. I go to look for his things in the bedroom and then see a blood stain”, worries the 35-year-old man.
Davy immediately dials 15. He reports the following symptoms to the SAMU: “Vomiting blood, difficulty breathing with heavy breathing, chest pain and a fever reacting to doliprane. The fever has gone down, but it was present before “. The SAMU regulator then asks him to “consult a general practitioner on duty at Altkirch hospital”. Davy then “hurriedly himself” drives his wife there. Arriving there, they went to the waiting room: “An old man was waiting, but given the state of my wife, he let us pass. I thank him for this gesture, given the seriousness of what happened”.
The general practitioner examines Anaïs: “He decides to check her oxygen saturation.”
The doctor is very surprised, because he sees a rate of 80%. The norm is usually between 95 and 100%, below which the vital prognosis is compromised.
Davy
Husband of Anaïs, affected by influenza A and several complications
Davy adds: “New measurements are taken, with another device. It obtains the same value: 80%,” explains Davy. The doctor then said to him: “Sir, it’s impossible. Are you sure it’s my house that they asked you to come to?” The healthcare professional calls 15 urgently. “It requires an ambulance with oxygen or a SMUR (Editor’s note: an ambulance with resuscitation equipment). While waiting for the vehicle, we are still at the Altkirch hospital, the doctor is looking for oxygen but cannot find any. not,” Davy continues.
The ambulance arrives, “20 minutes later” according to Davy. “They arrive with a monitor which indicates an oxygen saturation of 72%. The paramedics quickly deliver oxygen to her at a rate of 12 liters per minute, the maximum that a small cylinder can provide. They also decide to transfer her in Mulhouse”, according to Anaïs’ husband. They arrive at “11:12 p.m.” at the Mulhouse hospital (Haut-Rhin). Davy is patient in the waiting room and around midnight, two doctors come to get him: “They ask me around ten questions in two minutes, before telling me that Anaïs has a vital prognosis. They want to put her to sleep directly, to make a scanner.”
For Davy, a period of great uncertainty begins. “I can spend another 10 minutes with my wife, and I am in total distress, in panic. I can see her last look, before the intubation. It indicates fear to me, at the same time as she tells me ‘ I love you, take care of our daughter’. She nods at me, to point out all this. The doctors ask Anaïs if she is ready for sedation: she says yes. They ask me once more, to afraid that she would run out of oxygen, therefore lose consciousness and be unable to understand what was being said to her. They then took me out, and I waited in the waiting room until in the morning,” he says.
It is now March 9th. “At 5:42 a.m., a doctor comes to pick me up and shows me my wife’s box. There, I see her asleep on a respirator. I have the anesthetist directly who tells me that I can talk to her, but that we cannot I don’t know if the patients can hear or not. The doctor then comes and says to me directly, ‘Do you know what global organ degeneration is?’ And in tears, I answer yes. He then says ‘Unfortunately we are here’. The heart beats at 138 beats per minute, and tries to compensate for the lack. The doctor adds that ‘it’s a real marathon for a sleeping person of this age’ and adds ‘we hope that the heart will hold'”, describes Davy.
Time passes, and the doctors are not more optimistic: “For the lungs, the scanner showed a white image, like the color of yogurt. The doctors estimated that there was no visible lung function. ‘It’s full of phlegm, we don’t know if we’ll be able to restore lung function,’ they said. The doctor said ‘the kidneys have failed, the function is absent, and they have it put on dialysis. I was then frozen, paralyzed.”
They told me, ‘There you go, you can go home. Prepare seriously for a death. In 48 hours, we will be settled. The doctors really expected death.
Davy
Husband of Anaïs, affected by influenza A and several complications
Four hours later, Davy is authorized to call the health establishment for news: “I am told that Anaïs’s condition is not stable, and that they have put her on ECMO, a external device that replaces the lungs. It represents ‘the medical joker’ as they said, therefore the last hope.” He has another appointment at the hospital, at “2 p.m.”. He is put in the family room: he is notified of the first results of the blood tests: “It is influenza A. The doctors themselves are stunned, but for the moment they had nothing else. They say that the white blood cells are almost absent, that the vital prognosis is then very very serious, even serious and serious.”
The next day, Anaïs was in intensive care. Davy needs to make an appointment for a visit. “I was told of necrosis in the extremities of the feet and hands and possibly in the brain, but that we might not have a scan because it is complicated. I was told that we did not know to what extent it would be fine,” he describes. Davy remembers “two full months of intensive care with a lot of complications”, endured by Anaïs. “She will suffer several falls asleep and several awakenings, notably having two pneumothoraxes, therefore air between the pleura and the lungs, a pleural effusion, namely fluid between the pleura and the lungs. There, the vital prognosis was really engaged “I was told several times that I mightn’t get it out,” he remembers with emotion.
Anaïs then says “hyper water retention” : “His weight on arrival was 82kg. She increased to 55kg, due to muscle wasting. Then one morning, hyper water retention caused her to increase to 94kg. Following this, she had an embolization of her right leg: it involves closing a bleeding artery or vein, but you have to find it. She has bedsores on her forehead and cheek, following lying down, therefore having to turn her frequently. Which still saved his life, because it allowed a lot of phlegm to come out at that time. She also had a tracheotomy, which is a hole in her throat to make it easier to suction phlegm and breathe.”
Except that in the meantime, Anaïs has a “significant allergy to the contrast product for the scanner”. “It’s complicated, because we didn’t know what the allergen was. The doctors had to remove and then put back the medications gradually, to find out which one was causing the problem. While keeping the vital products, allergy or not, because there were medications that had to be left behind,” adds Davy. To this must be added “a reversible posterior leukoencephalopathy”, according to Davy: “As the blood pressure was poorly regulated, the arterial vessels of the brain crushed the white mass. She was awakened, with short-term memory loss and in the medium term. She will be able to recover them, provided that the white mass recovers its volume quickly, to avoid irreversible damage.”
Davy, present from the start, counted “50 days in a coma, 53 days of continuous dialysis and 39 days on ECMO, in addition to a conventional respirator”, for Anaïs. However, this is not the end of their troubles. The complications go further: on June 1, Anaïs must have her feet amputated at the level of the first metatarsal, i.e. the area of the “toes and a little before”.
Doctors try to preserve the foot as much as possible. Her hands are also amputated: four phalanges including the thumb of her left hand.
Davy
Husband of Anaïs, affected by influenza A and several complications
A painful bone leads to a second amputation operation, this time on the left foot. On July 14, this same foot was amputated once more: “They will go up 10 cm below the knee. There is therefore no more tibia and foot. This, following difficulty in healing the left foot and the loss of mobility. The bone began to freeze.”
Today, Anaïs is alive, she is fighting. “Out of love for us, my daughter, for me. She has to completely relearn how to walk with prostheses. Unfortunately, there are still complications, recently a bone infection in her right foot, which is still poorly healed. All this combined with the Covid. There is phantom limb pain and several other difficulties,” laments Davy.
Having another difficulty: “I was a trainer in a sterile area, so I mightn’t be reached by phone. If the hospital called, I mightn’t answer. I almost mightn’t concentrate, in the job I was doing, with the idea that my wife was going to die. Not to mention that visits to the hospital were by appointment, to the intensive care unit, therefore during my working hours. I lost my job in Switzerland, following the situation.”
Davy’s fight is now multiple. Now dismissed from his job “with effect from November 30, given the situation”, he believes that the support provided by the emergency services was insufficient. “I made a complaint by email to the ARS, the Regional Health Agency. I wanted to keep the recording of my call to 15. I wondered why I was asked to transport myself- even Anaïs in the hospital. The agency replied to me, five months later, that the emergency was handled normally,” Davy is indignant. At the same time, he must deal with new conditions, given Anaïs’ disability.
“We have to recognize the fact that it is an illness due to his professional activity, that is obvious. We also have to readjust the accommodation: we live in a small house with several levels, stairs. We cannot does not plan a house according to disability. I hope that we change our outlook on disability, because it can happen to anyone. What happened to us happened overnight,” thunders Davy. The man, who wishes to point out that he worked in a vaccine production company – “a shame”, according to him – also wants to emphasize the importance of vaccination once morest the flu. “People think that it only affects the elderly, when it can affect everyone. This is very important because the flu kills,” he adds.
READ ALSO. Covid-19 vaccine, flu vaccine: everything you need to know if you plan to get vaccinated
The disability also led to new costs. “Even if we have money saved, we have to rehabilitate our house. We have to pay for a prosthesis. Not all of them are reimbursed by Social Security: this is the case for models with metal bars, but not for ‘aesthetic’ models. It was therefore necessary to launch a prize poolto be able to cover these additional costs”, concludes Davy.
All this, to ensure that Anaïs can “come home, continue to live happily”. Above all, as Davy reminds us, try to return to “a normal life” followingwards.
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