Doctors thought she had the stomach flu. But it was near-fatal sepsis

In 2011, Shannon McKenney, a singer from Burnaby, B.C., suddenly fell violently ill at a dinner party.

Thinking it was food poisoning, she went to the emergency room with severe pain and nausea, only to be sent home with a diagnosis of the stomach flu.

But when her appendix ruptured days later, her condition took a life-threatening turn. Though she survived the ordeal, her health never fully returned to normal.

Doctors initially blamed the lingering symptoms on complications from her appendix. What none of them realized was that McKenney had just survived a hidden and dangerous battle with sepsis.

“I thought, ‘OK, I’m a young, healthy woman. I’m going to recover. It was just a ruptured appendix, no big deal,’” McKenney told Global News.

“But that was the beginning of 13 years of recovery from sepsis.”

Sepsis is a severe condition that occurs when the body’s response to an infection damages its own tissues and organs.

It is also known as septicemia or “blood poisoning,” and is most commonly caused by bacterial infections but can also stem from viruses or fungal infections, according to the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

It can develop rapidly, often within hours if left untreated. It may lead to shock, multi-organ failure and death — especially if not recognized early and treated promptly.

With nearly 50 million cases and 11 million deaths globally each year, sepsis is a significant health crisis; but despite its prevalence, it remains difficult to diagnose quickly and accurately.

In Canada, one in 18 deaths involves sepsis, making it the 12th leading cause of death nationally, according to the Canadian Sepsis Foundation.

And anyone can get sepsis, no matter the age.

Many patients diagnosed with the illness require care in the ICU, placing a considerable burden on the health-care system. The cost of treating sepsis in Canada amounts to $325 million annually. And although diagnosis and treatment of sepsis is improving, the foundation said rates are still on the rise.

Early symptoms of sepsis often resemble those of other common illnesses. Patients might experience flu-like signs such as fever, rapid breathing and a fast heart rate. These symptoms, however, are easily mistaken for other illnesses and make it hard to diagnose, according to Johns Hopkins Medicine.

Treating sepsis requires urgent medical care, including antimicrobials, intravenous fluids and other supportive measures. Even when patients survive, sepsis can have long-lasting effects, leading to ongoing health issues that may persist for years.

McKenney’s first sign that something was wrong came when she didn’t recover as expected.

She was constantly in pain and couldn’t eat. Over the next two years, she was in and out of the hospital with various issues causing her severe discomfort. In 2013, she was hospitalized again — this time for intense pain caused by her gallbladder. She developed another infection, once again leading to sepsis.

Yet, even then, doctors couldn’t pinpoint why she was so sick.

“My hair fell out. My toenails fell off. It was pretty bad,” McKenney said. “However, they didn’t call it sepsis that time,” she said, adding that she was weak and barely able to stand, and she spent 18 days over Christmas and the new year in the hospital.

After her hospital stay, she continued to struggle with her recovery, leaving doctors still baffled by her condition.

Then, in July 2019, sepsis returned for a third time — this time triggered by the flu and possibly something she believed she contracted from a plane. Finally, doctors diagnosed her with sepsis and
confirmed the previous two times she was in hospital she had also suffered from sepsis.

“That’s when all the dots started connecting,” she said.

McKenney believes she was misdiagnosed for over a decade due to the challenges of diagnosing sepsis.

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McKenney continues to struggle with the long-term effects of sepsis. She lives with anxiety, depression, insomnia and fatigue, and worries that she may never be able to return to work.

“I’ve had a migraine for six years — it’s unrelenting. Now, I struggle with memory recall and have ongoing gastric issues from the trauma to my abdomen,” she said.

Once a singer, she added that she has also struggled with her singing since her battle with sepsis.

While there is no cure for sepsis, Dr. Claudia dos Santos, a critical care clinician-scientist at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, is developing life-saving treatments for the condition.

“Sepsis is treated in two ways. The first way is with antimicrobials. So these include antibiotics, antivirus or antifungal medications that treat the invading organism. The other way that we treat sepsis is we provide support, organ support for example, like fluid resuscitation, sometimes mechanical ventilation, and dialysis,” she said.

“But those two types of treatments don’t treat the reason why sepsis happens, which is this immune dysregulation.”

Dos Santos is developing a new treatment for sepsis that aims to block inflammation, boost white blood cells’ ability to fight bacteria and prevent heart and lung failure. She now hopes to test her groundbreaking approach in preclinical trials to move quickly toward saving lives.

“We have found that very small molecules can be used to treat the immune dysregulation,” she said. “And we’re encapsulating these very small molecules into something called a nanoparticle. And what these molecules do is they bind to cells and allow us to deliver inside the cell … thereby helping the immune system fight the infection without getting so much of the damage associated with sepsis to the other cells.”

The research is now entering safety studies, but dos Santos noted that it has already been 15 years in the making.

“And we’re now moving to the final stages of making sure that they are safe so that we can go ahead and move towards trying them in patients with sepsis,” she said.

“Our plan is to work over the next year, complete our safety studies and submit the entire all of the data that we’ve garnered to Health Canada … at which point Health Canada will let us know if we have approval to begin our first human trials over the next year,” dos Santos said.