Outpatient Surgery Magazine, providing current information on Surgical Services, Surgical Facility Administration, Outpatient Surgery News and Trends, OR Excellence and more.
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J U L Y 2 0 1 6 • O U T PA T I E N TS U R G E R Y. N E T • 1 4 7 Eight days after getting an injection to help relieve the chronic discomfort in her right hip, Phyllis Briggs was dancing at her granddaughter's wedding. Four days after that, she woke up with the most excruciat- ing pain she'd ever felt. "I was frantic — I couldn't move my body to get out of bed," says Ms. Briggs, now 77. After 3 days of almost unbearable pain, she finally decided she need- ed to go to the hospital. The massive New England Compounding Center (NECC) scandal that was about to unfold was still completely unknown, so after 5 days of treatment with steroids, she was released. "But I didn't get any bet- ter," she says. "The headaches were so bad, and I was terribly light-sensitive. We didn't know what was going on." Eventually, after several patients showed up at the same hospital with similar symptoms, and reports about NECC began to surface, her doctor suggested she come back for additional tests. "I began to hear "I felt like my life had been taken from me." "I felt like my life had been taken from me." • PHYLLIS AND BILL BRIGGS The hallucinations were so bad, "my husband would have to hold me down at night." words I'd never heard before," she says. "What's this about meningitis?" In the odyssey that followed, she spent a week in the ICU and a total of 33 days in the hospital, during which she also caught pneumonia. Her family had to celebrate Thanksgiving without her. "I felt like my life had been taken from me," she says. "I was an active 73. I had been doing yard work. I was dancing at my granddaughter's wedding. And now I'm just lying there, not able to get up and go to the bathroom without help." Finally back home in Traverse City, Mich., she endured a year and a half of side effects caused by the antifungal Vfend (voriconazole), a powerful anti- fungal used to treat serious, invasive fungal infections. "I had terrible hallucinations," she says. "My husband would have to hold me down at night." And now? "I feel like right now I'm just finally getting back to where I was 4 years ago," she says. — Jim Burger