The Symptoms Kept Getting Stranger ✙

追加: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]In 2019, a healthy 23-year-old Australian young woman named Caitlyn Alop thought she had the flu. She thought at first she had a cold, then it quickly progressed to feeling very sick with fever, chills, fatigue, and then eventually within hours her tongue started to swell. Her tongue became swollen mostly on one side. She self diagnosed it with maybe I ate something and had an allergic reaction, but I also feel really crummy. She texted her aunt.

[00:00:36]Her aunt came and got her and brought her into the emergency department.

[00:00:41]From there, the physicians placed her into a medicallyinduced coma. She was on a ventilator in the intensive care unit for 9 days. Very critically ill. Her tongue became more swollen. the swelling came down her neck. She also had a blotchy, purply red rash on her face and chest. And she ended up after nine days in the intensive care unit, finally being able to go to a step down unit, but she was still hospitalized for another couple weeks. During her time in the intensive care unit, as her tongue swelled, it then became black. And the conversation from the physicians to her family was to expect the worst. And this tongue or part of it might have to be surgically removed. And it all started with an impacted wisdom tooth. Caitlyn had no symptoms of any teeth. Her symptoms were flu, fever type symptoms and then tongue and mouth pain and then a rash like I mentioned. So, it didn't progress in a way that she would have thought it had to do with her wisdom tooth. Hi everybody, welcome back. My name is Lisa. I'm a registered nurse and I like to talk about stories where we learn from others how we can be our best advocate. And this story is really important about how quickly any infection in our body, wherever it originates, in her case her tooth, but it could be the lungs, the kidneys, a laceration on a leg, but how quickly those infections can become life-threatening. What makes Caitlyn's story so powerful is she had sepsis. and sepsis as her blood pressure as she became sicker and her blood pressure then dropped and the physician said that she had septacmia. She was very very sick and what all of this was about was something called Ludwig's angina.

[00:02:47]Ludwig's angina is a bacterial infection underneath the tongue that is in the mouth and can come originate from what she had which was an impacted wisdom tooth or other oral or fairing bacterial infections and issues. And in her case it started with this tooth and it progressed to Ludwig's angina. I'll show you pictures because this whole neck area then becomes infected as well and very very swollen inside and out. When I watched Caitlyn speak in interviews, she said that she literally had no idea she even had sepsis until sometime later.

[00:03:31]She didn't. She thought she had Ludwick's angina and she thought she had a dental emergency.

[00:03:38]Later on, she learned that it was sepsis. She wasn't automatically well when she got out of the hospital. Her mother had to move in with her, had to take care of her, and she had a long road to recovery as many people with sepsis and post ICU intubation experience. Caitlyn stated that she felt like she was burning from the inside out and she had drains. Uh she claims 16 of them if I remember right, different types of drains and this was throughout her chest with these open sores and in her neck. This bacteria became uh a breeding ground for this inflammation that needed to be drained. And of course, they had to go in and take that tooth out.

[00:04:25]She almost lost her tongue, but she made it. And the statistics are still uh grim for sepsis, but improving. Thankfully, Caitlyn survived, but her recovery was very long. She states that she got out of the hospital within a couple weeks after her nine days in the intensive care unit. She was on a liquid diet and a soft diet. She had to go to speech therapy and other types of therapies because she felt her body couldn't even move to take one step. It's a long recovery with all of the open sores that had to remain open to be able to drain and those had to take had time that they had to heal as well. Her story has gained worldwide attention over the years. She is an advocate along with many other people who are survivors of sepsis. She's an advocate for education what the symptoms are that even a small infection can become worse. She speaks all over the world in Australia. She's online. I'll list some information below. She has taught people also what Ludwig's angina is. Have you even heard of that? It's not something that you hear of that often, but she's made people aware of that and aware of the fact that like in her case, she had this uh infected abscessed tooth, her wisdom tooth, that she didn't have any symptoms there. That the day before her hospitalization, she was walking about and feeling under the weather, but she wasn't in a life-threatening situation at that time. So she reminds people that infections can take over very very quickly. Medicine is full of conditions where symptoms whisper to us before they are loud and force us to go in. And and I know even in cases like that, conditions can be missed. At the beginning when she first went in, she was convinced that her she had tongue swelling because she ate something that gave her an allergic reaction. So she went into the ER saying that. So they did treat her for that. She didn't get better. She got worse really fast. She was airlifted then to another larger medical center where things progressed more and then she was ventilated and in the in the ICU. Her story just reminds us that subtle symptoms can happen, that we can't ignore our symptoms or self diagnose, although it's so easy to do.

[00:06:56]We all do it. but that it's better to go in and be safe and ask that question, could this be sepsis? Thank you for joining. If you enjoy subtle symptom documentaries, true medical stories, and compassionate healthc care storytelling, please consider subscribing because this is exactly what I talk about on this channel. I'll see you at the next health video.