Intuition refers to the ability to understand or know something instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning or logical analysis.
At least that’s how ChatGPT defines it.
But most of us define intuition as an insight that comes from a gut feeling. I like to think of it as the whisper you hear in your own voice. And when we choose not to listen, hindsight usually yells at us later.
And while it’s often intangible, and not highly visible, intuition can lead to very real outcomes. In my case, it was a string of intuition-based decisions that saved my life.
On Friday 12th November 2021, I was admitted to hospital with severe dehydration after 24 hours of what I though was a bad bout of gastro. I was given an anti-nausea injection and a bag of IV fluids. I napped in emergency for 20 minutes, woke up, felt 100. Woke up the next morning, went for an 8k run and that night went to the Sunshine Coast Business Awards with a group of friends, many of whom are here tonight. That night, my intuition told me something wasn’t right because I couldn’t finish one glass of wine. Now ask anyone who knows me and they will tell you that would have set off their spidey senses too.
I woke up on the Sunday not feeling great and by that afternoon had fallen in a heap and went to bed. I put it down to exhaustion and stupidly going for an 8k run after a severe bout of gastro.
By 3am the next morning I was in all sorts of trouble. I woke up in a pool of sweat and literally couldn’t work out where I was because my temperature was so high that I was hallucinating and there were jet skis and clowns whizzing around my bedroom.
Then, I suddenly felt incredibly cold. Ice cold. I crawled into a hot shower and sat in it until my skin was burned but still couldn’t get warm. My intuition, as sick as I was, wasn’t whispering at me. It was ordering me to get to hospital. I crawled back to bed to find my phone but passed out a metre from the bed. What happened next is a mystery that may never be solved.
My phone is always on silent. I have an aversion to ring tones so when I woke up an hour later to a ringing phone, it was even more confusing. I answered the phone, not even sure if I was dreaming or not and it was a doctor from the hospital calling to arrange an ambulance to collect me immediately.
Unbeknown to me, on the Friday night in hospital I’d had taken a blood test. When the doctor on duty reviewed my blood profile, her intuition told her that my inflammatory marker looked a little high for gastro.
So she had sent the bloods off for an extra culture test to detect infection, a test that takes 48-72 hours to get results from.
The results had come in and it showed I had an acute E.coli blood infection – in other words, septicaemia.
When I got to hospital a team of doctors pounced on me and inserted three cannulas and hooked me up to three big bags of antibiotics. The vibe of urgency and panic made me think I was in a bit of trouble. When the doctor asked me who my next of kin was and if I had my affairs in order I knew I probably should be panicking. But in reality I was too sick to panic.
And to make matters worse, my next of kin Chris was stuck in a lock-down in Melbourne so couldn’t get to me.
Long story short, 48 hours later I was in real strife and the doctors rang Chris and told him that none of the antibiotics were working and that I was hours away from organ failure. There was one more antibiotic left to try and if that failed, there was nothing more they could do.
Spoiler alert: the anti-biotic worked. All up I had eight days in ICU and 68 one-litre bags of antibiotics.
When it was all over, Chris was home and I went for one-month post hospital check-up and the doctor showed us my post sepsis blood profile compared to my hospital blood profile. He said ‘I want you look closely at this – your main inflammatory marker, which in any healthy person sits below 5 – yours got to 187. And you should feel proud of that because most people would be dead at 160 or at least have severe amputations.’
He told us that the only explanation for how I survived was that I had an incredible baseline fitness.
You see, a few years earlier intuition had led me to join Running for Premature Babies, a charity that raises funds for life-saving equipment for Neonatal intensive care units. When my son Ollie was born nine weeks premature I saw first-hand how critical this equipment was and how it literally saves little lives.
In early 2021 the charity’s founder, Sophie Smith, had appointed me Queensland ambassador for Running for Premature Babies and when I was admitted to hospital and found myself up against it, I had been training for a half marathon, a decision that probably saved my life.
So in a beautiful, full circle moment, it was Sophie’s decision to start this incredible charity after losing triplets to prematurity, our connection and the intuition of that incredible ER doctor at Noosa Hospital that led to me being here today.
When we trust our intuition, the impact may not be immediately obvious. But it could set in motion a series of events that could one day be life-changing.
