A Year Ago

Salmonella bacteria

https://www.fda.gov/food/foodborne-pathogens/salmonella-salmonellosis

A year ago, my mother took me to the hospital. I had no idea that I would not leave that building until two weeks later. In advance, I’d like to warn readers that this post may stray a bit from my usual posts that give tidbits of my days at the museum and silly childhood memories. But, after all, it is the one year anniversary, so I feel like my two truths and a lie “no way” piece of information deserves a bit of attention. 

Last January, I was in India for my mom’s cousin’s wedding and ate a ton of yummy food. A few weeks after getting back, I started to experience horrible stomach pains, chills, and a lack of an appetite. After long hours lying in the Emergency room, I was told that I had a rapidly escalating bacterial infection due to Salmonella and E. Coli. Usually, bacterial infections stay in the gastrointestinal tract and flush out naturally. Unfortunately, mine had entered my bloodstream and was reproducing quickly, which is much, much harder to stop. I was moved to the Intensive Care Unit and told that my body was entering sepsis—when the body's response to an infection damages its own tissues and organs—and needed to be intubated, which I was for five days. This was the most harrowing experience of my life, but although my body took a toll over the course of these couple weeks, my cognitive ability remained sharp if not sharper, and I began to question the current standard of care at hospitals. 

During my time in the hospital, my doctors placed me on several broad-spectrum antibiotics as they were unable to quickly diagnose the subspecies of Salmonella that I was infected with. This trial-and-error method ultimately worked, but was concerning to me. Weeks after my slow yet stable recovery, the New York Department of Health identified the pathogen as Salmonella Typhi, contracted during a trip to India. Hearing the DOH call my mom the day after I had been discharged was annoying; where was that information a week ago? I questioned why hospitals seemed ill-prepared to treat pathogens, especially those stemming from international travel. I channeled all these emotions the only way I knew how to—to learn and understand more scientifically what and how this had happened to me. I eventually got the opportunity to speak with a PI at the DOH. She informed me that, though the rise of antimicrobial resistance makes rapid identification more critical than ever, many hospitals lack funding or liability coverage to use the gene-sequencing equipment that identifies subspecies, hence why the process is so slow. This sparked a determination to study how countries could collaborate on sharing data and innovate new disease-combatant methodologies. A few weeks after getting back to my daily routine and pondering this issue, I formed a research question: 

How can we expedite accurate identification of bacterial infections acquired internationally and match patients to the right antibiotic? 

This marks the beginning of the documentation of my exploration of this question in this blog, and I’ll hope you’ll stay to hear more about how I turned a horrible experience into a research quest.