A 23-year-old girl almost died during a self-driving trip to North Island! Why does this common ailment turn into a killer?

Comprehensive report from New Zealand Chinese Herald A British woman traveling in New Zealand has told of her horrific brush with death. What initially seemed like a minor urinary tract infection turned into life-threatening sepsis.

During Easter 2024, Rosie Beveridge, 23 years old at the time, was traveling by car on the Twin Coast Discovery Highway in the North Island of New Zealand with her boyfriend.

On Wednesday, she developed symptoms of a urinary tract infection. On Friday, I started to feel soreness in my waist and a tingling sensation in my right abdomen.

On Saturday morning, she thought it was just an ordinary 24-hour cold and even persuaded her boyfriend to go fishing as usual.

However, Beveridge’s symptoms continued to worsen and she and her boyfriend agreed to see a doctor the next day if her condition didn’t improve on Sunday.

On Monday morning, Beveridge said she woke up and all her symptoms were worse, so they drove about an hour to a hospital in Kawaka.

She was misdiagnosed with appendicitis. But for Beveridge, the misdiagnosis likely saved her life.

Since the hospital did not have an operating room, she was transferred to another hospital an hour away for treatment. There, doctors discovered she had sepsis and immediately began treatment.

What happened next remains somewhat hazy, Beveridge said. But she remembers being scared, so far away from her family, that everything felt like a dream. At Whangarei Hospital, she buried her head on the floor while her boyfriend talked to a nurse at the front desk.

Ron Daniels, intensive care consultant of the British National Health Service and founder and chief medical officer of the British Sepsis Trust, said that the symptoms of sepsis vary from person to person and are easily misdiagnosed. “For every hour that treatment is delayed, survival rates decrease by 1 to 2 percent.”

Doctors suspected Beveridge’s sepsis stemmed from a kidney infection, but about 30 percent of cases begin with a common urinary tract infection.

After four days in the hospital, Beveridge left the hospital in a wheelchair because she was too weak to walk.

Over the next month, she suffered from “sepsis syndrome,” characterized by extreme fatigue, memory loss, and anxiety.

Now, nearly two years after that incident, Beveridge has basically recovered physically and mentally.

She decided to share this experience as a reminder to all travelers: never ignore the tiny signals your body is sending.

Related reading: