When Life Changes in a Heartbeat

I never imagined that a persistent fever and a few strange symptoms would nearly cost me my life.

In the fall of 2016, I was living a normal life — busy, sometimes stressed, but otherwise healthy. Or so I thought. When the first signs of illness appeared — a fever, neck pain, overwhelming exhaustion — I brushed them off. So did the doctors. I was told it was a pinched nerve, food poisoning, maybe a virus. I trusted the diagnoses, took the medications, and kept trying to push through.

But something was terribly wrong.

What followed was months of unexplained sickness, waves of fevers, crippling fatigue, and a growing sense of fear. I went through appointment after appointment, test after test, and still no clear answers. I knew in my gut something serious was happening — but no one knew what it was.

It wasn’t until January 2017, when my body was on the verge of complete collapse, that the real cause was discovered: endocarditis. A bacterial infection had taken hold of my heart’s tricuspid valve, silently eating away at my body from the inside. By the time it was caught, the infection had already spread, causing life-threatening complications.

I was rushed into the hospital, put on powerful antibiotics, and ultimately wheeled into open-heart surgery. Even then, things didn’t go smoothly. I faced complications like HIT (heparin-induced thrombocytopenia), dangerously low platelets, a pulmonary embolism, severe fluid retention, repeated hospital stays, and multiple blood transfusions.

I shouldn’t be here today. But somehow, I survived.

This book is my attempt to tell the story — not just the medical facts, but the human experience behind them. I want to give voice to the fear, confusion, pain, and ultimately, the resilience that carried me through. I want to shed light on how easy it is for a rare, deadly condition like endocarditis to slip through the cracks, and how critical it is to listen to your body, advocate for yourself, and keep fighting even when the odds seem stacked against you.

My hope is that by sharing this journey, I can help others who might face a similar battle — or at the very least, remind you how fragile and precious life really is.

This is not just a story of illness. It’s a story of survival.