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Father Hopes Erin's Story Will Save Others

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IRENE MAHER, News Channel 8 Medical Editor

Published: September 14, 2007

Erin Flatley was 23 years old, a pretty, blue-eyed blonde attending graduate school at the University of South Florida. She wanted to be a teacher. But in 2002, Flatley went to the hospital for a minor outpatient surgical procedure. Six days later, she was dead.

Flatley had the procedure on a Wednesday and went home feeling fine. By Friday, though, she knew something was wrong and went to the hospital emergency room with a fever, a rapid heart rate and pain. Doctors said the symptoms were normal after surgery and sent her home.

Over the next two days, the symptoms worsened, and on Sunday, she went back to the emergency room. This time she was admitted to the hospital, but there was apparently no urgency to evaluate her condition and begin treatment.

Time ticked by. No one knew how seriously ill Flatley was until Monday evening, just hours before her death, when a physician suggested she might be septic. The doctor moved Flatley to intensive care and started administering serious antibiotics. He briefed her parents.

"It was the first time I heard she had an infection and could die," says Carl Flatley, Erin's father. "The thought that she could die was unbelievable to us. We were in shock."

Flatley had developed an infection that invaded her blood stream. The condition, called sepsis, is a serious but little understood blood infection that even doctors and nurses can fail to recognize.

"It wasn't one doctor or nurse who made a mistake. The entire system failed," says Flatley, a 68-year-old retired dentist living in Dunedin. He says his daughter was seen by no fewer than five doctors and even more nurses in the days leading up to her death. "They didn't recognize sepsis," he says.

More than 750,000 cases of sepsis are diagnosed in the United States every year. About a third of those patients die.

"It really is a hidden epidemic," says Daniel Haight, director of the Polk County Health Department and a medical doctor who specializes in infectious diseases.

The key to survival is recognizing the condition early and involving an infectious disease specialist who can quickly identify the cause of the infection and choose the right antibiotic to fight it. Haight warns that "rapid action is critical." But diagnosing sepsis presents a difficult challenge for physicians.

One of the first symptoms, a fever, can easily be dismissed as something less serious, especially when the patient is young and otherwise healthy, such as Erin Flatley. But she had recently had surgery, which increased her sepsis risk.

Others at high risk for sepsis include the very young and the very old, particularly those who have some other chronic medical condition such as diabetes, emphysema or urinary tract infections. As the illness progresses, patients develop chills, a rapid heart rate, rapid breathing and low blood pressure.

Erin Flatley had all of those symptoms.

"I didn't know what sepsis was," Erin's father told me. "Unfortunately, neither did the doctors."

So he set out to change that. In the year after his daughter's death, he learned all he could about sepsis, and, with the help of Eli Lilly, the manufacturer of a sepsis-fighting drug, started the American Sepsis Alliance, a foundation to promote education and awareness.

The Rotary Club of Clearwater East, moved by Erin's story, is co-sponsoring "Fantasy in Blue and Gold," a fundraiser Sept. 22 at the Kapok Special Events Center, to support education programs.

Flatley is working with the USF College of Medicine and St. Petersburg College's School of Nursing to ensure that more sepsis education is part of the curriculum. Flatley travels the country telling Erin's story to community and health care groups. Because of that, people everywhere are learning about sepsis and lives will surely be saved. With her dad's help, Erin did become a teacher after all.

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