However, one of my patients is being worked up in immunology and has a story very similar to mine, she can't get back to where she was before she had sepsis which is what started my research. I thought maybe I am not the only one. Then I stumbled upon post sepsis syndrome.

I am writing to you for help. This has effected every aspect of my life, I even had to leave my job as an ICU nurse because it was wearing me out – I couldn't handle it which kills me. I am that nurse you gave your hard patients to, the difficult families, complicated patients, hard traumas. Not anymore. I just can't handle it.

My friend told me that I would stare at the venetian blinds and say, “I am watching a very good movie”.   When a doctor or nurse would come into the room and ask where that I thought that I was, I would read off the white board which included the date, day of the week, location, and nurse’s name.

After I went home, someone slept with me for the first two weeks. I also wrote a check for $31 but documented in my checkbook that I had written a check for $98.87. I also forgot that my sister had passed away over a year ago. I could not use the TV remote, microwave, or air conditioner/heater. I tried to make macaroni and cheese and ruined it. I left boiling water on the stove while I fell asleep for 3 hours. I drove my car at night and had trouble finding my way home.

I need answers. I found your study on Google. Thanks for that. I just hope one day I will be normal again, and this is temporary.

Then after five years of this hell, Oct 2 2013 CBS News ran a report about people just like me. From that report I found your website. I cried for a long time when I read it, finally someone who knows what my past five years has been like. The things you do that you have no control over. I sent your website to my family and it has changed my wife’s opinion about me. There is something about knowing that I am not alone and it isn’t my fault that makes a difference. For the first time in the past five years, I believe I have a future. Thank you.

I was on a ventilator and heavily sedated for nine days. I experienced what I call a prolonged nightmare. The theme: I was in an experimental hospital to learn what it's like to be completely dependent on someone else. I am a nurse so figured it was my punishment. The nightmare seemed to go on and on with different twists and turns.

After I was extubated and sedation was discontinued, I continued to have paranoid delusions about the nurses wanting to harm me. I repeatedly told my family that when I was dead, the nurses were going to put my body in a large trash can at the foot of my bed. I was obsessed about it and no one could tell me anything to the contrary. I was hallucinating at times especially at night when I was alone. I saw outlines of skeletons on the wall, heard strange sounds, etc. I believed I had been moved into various parts of the hospital, including the basement. I misinterpreted environmental cues and attempts to help me were interpreted as meanness. At discharge, the Neuropsychological Evaluation (NP) revealed significant deficits. I have a history of depression which was also present at discharge.

I was never told by anyone what to expect. When I reported cognitive concerns to my neurologist at the follow-up visit he gave me a Mini-Mental which I could have passed in my sleep.

After 5 months I felt better and returned to work but was fired 10 weeks later. I was devastated because I am a successful professional and had never lost a job. At the same time, it didn't surprise me because I was struggling terribly. I couldn't organize my work; committed many errors in documentation; frequently lost things; forgot meetings, and did not manage my time well. I tried to hide it and compensate but to no avail. I also fatigued easily. At the follow-up NP evaluation four months after discharge (prior to returning to work), the report stated that I was "back to baseline," however; the written report noted numerous deficiencies. After I lost my job I called the psychologist who stated it was "semantics". I appealed to my insurance for a second NP evaluation by the psychologist at the hospital. It revealed deficits in attention and executive function. I experienced major depression which didn't resolve for 18 months.

I'm hoping to return to work in the near future, at least part-time but I'm very nervous about it. I think there's been improvement but I still experience difficulty in attention and organization and still lose things on a regular basis. I at least need to try.

Hearing about your research on NPR has been very validating for me. I'll continue to follow your research, and in particular any new developments regarding treatment or remedy.

Unfortunately, I also remember being so overwhelmed by anxiety that my feet were in almost constant motion, back and forth, back and forth. My family began to recognize that when I shook my hands like that with my fingers splayed it meant that I wanted medication to help me tolerate the anxiety. They couldn't always give me anything.

Part of the time, I thought I was being restrained by elastic bands that held me down so that I couldn't move. The walls around me looked like I was being held in a multi-level pagoda. In my mind, I was plotting my escape to home, thinking I could pick at the threads of the imagined sewn elastic restraints and set myself free. Randomly I saw small Asian people who wouldn't look at me and I saw a black cat and a black pot-bellied pig. All the while, I was so, SO consumed by anxiety. Just remembering brings back shadows of anxiety.

Two weeks later I was summoned for day surgery to sort the nose out. My conversation with a porter about the next day's FA Cup final, while making my way down to theatre, is the last memory I have before being plunged into the most terrifying experience of my life.

The next occasion when I had any perception of time was 12 days later, when I found myself being stared at by two middle aged men in dark suits and bright ties. One was busily explaining to me that I was in the Intensive Care Unit and that I was quite safe. However, I knew better. I knew they were lying. For me, the reason I was in a bed, on a ventilator, hardly able to move, was that I had been drugged and kidnapped. It had all started in Portugal; at least I thought it was Portugal, where I'd been abducted. At some point I'd managed to escape but was re-captured and taken to a hospital, a few miles from my home.

I knew that I must have done something wrong, to be held with no hope of escape, but I had no idea what it was. I'd tried on several occasions to pull the tube out of my mouth, but had always been instantly plunged back into darkness. It never crossed my mind that there might have been a medical reason for my predicament, and I had no knowledge that severe aspiration pneumonia following my routine surgery had landed me in ICU and was putting my family through hell.

What I did know with certainty though was that I would die. One particular doctor would visit me every time I started to wake. He always wore the same clothes and would always speak slowly and deliberately. You've been dying to know what that sign on the wall says, haven't you?, he asked one day. He was right; I had wondered what it said but the problem was I could see two of everything and objects and people were frequently blurred so I hadn't been able to read it. I'll tell you what it says, he continued. It says moron. We put it there so every time you open your eyes it's the first thing you see; so that for every minute of every day you know exactly what you are. Unfortunately I'm not allowed to turn your ventilator off, but I want you out of here, and you will leave soon, in a body bag. You're not going to live, but just remember every time you open your eyes you will see exactly what we think of you moron. From then on, that sign was the only thing I could see that wasn't blurred.

The rest of my stay in ICU was filled with more incidents of despair, humiliation and terror. I saw a patient stabbed to death by his wife, and two people committing suicide. I witnessed arguments, in my mind all caused by me, and the pain I felt as my lungs started to recover was all part of a plan to give me pain inducing drugs “ in fact I had seen doctors laughing about it.

The day after I was extubated I found myself in the High Dependency Unit, where the sheer terror of the execution attempts began. Initially I thought I was in the morgue as I was lying flat and was extremely cold. There was a plain clothes policeman watching me because I'd witnessed a murder on ICU. Someone spoke to me I can control your mind they said, and then proceeded to demonstrate they had power over me by causing me pain and by interrupting my supply of oxygen at will. The following morning a tall and distinguished looking man sat down and explained to me that I had Pershing's Disease. This was a rare congenital heart condition that can lie dormant for many years. Once a sufferer shows symptoms, however, their life expectancy is less than a year. In my mind I might as well just die where I was, and the doctor encouraged me to do exactly that.

Pershing's Disease of course, does not exist, but just like everything else that happened to me, the hallucination I had where It was explained was so convincing that I was still trying to find evidence of its existence weeks later.

I was put into a side room in HDU, allegedly for infection control, but I knew it was for my execution. I'd heard the nurses talk about CTO, which was a Compulsory Termination Order, and one had been issued for me. As the blinds were pulled down over the room's windows and door, smoke appeared through every vent. A voice told me it was cyanide and I would die more quickly if I relaxed and inhaled it. I watched it creep closer paralyzed with terror, and all I could think about was that I would never see my family again.

Having somehow survived, the execution attempts continued. They included suffocation, poisoning, drug overdoses and being forced to hold my breath until 4 lights went out on my monitor. By the time I moved down to a respiratory ward I had given up trying to convince my family that the hospital staff were trying to kill me. I still had no idea of what was wrong with me, and when my husband explained, I was sure that all my problems had been induced and had not simply happened. It was then that I decided to keep quiet about my views as no-one believed me or was prepared to help me, so I planned my escape alone. By this time I could take some of my medications orally, so this gave me some element of control, as I would wait until the nurse left the room, then would throw the pills containing poison into the medical waste. I ate nothing at mealtimes, but instead stole pieces of cutlery that would help me pry my window open. I was utterly oblivious to the fact that I was four floors up. The hallucinations had stopped by now but were replace by paranoia and deviousness. The day I planned to leave via the window was the day I was discharged. That might seem lucky, but I spent the next few months wishing that I had died that day.

My physical recovery once I was home moved forward very quickly, but inside I was in meltdown. I couldn't tell anyone how I really felt “ my family and friends had been through so much already. My delirium and its consequences caused me to believe that I was still being poisoned, even after leaving hospital, so I stopped taking my medication. What do I wish had been different for me? Well, when I received a copy of my medical notes following a suggestion that it would help me to make some sense of what had happened, I read through the hundreds of pages that comprised a file 6 inches thick. Only once did I find a relevant reference. It was one about me being severely paranoid, and that note was made by a physiotherapist. Although I have no doubts whatsoever that the care I received was of the highest order, I still feel today that my delirium was seen as an acceptable side effect of my illness and treatment. Months later, during my ICU follow-up appointment, they were not at all surprised that I had suffered prolonged and extreme delirium; in fact they appeared to know I had. To them it was normal. To me it was anything but.

Two years have now passed since my experience of delirium. In that time I've been able to make sense of at least some of what happened to me. My mother reminded me that my belief I'd been kidnapped could well have been my brain confusing my situation with something that had been constantly in the news. Unfortunately, I'd shared my birthday, the day of my accident, with the day that Madeleine McCann was taken from her family's holiday apartment in Portugal, and the tragedy had been at the top of every news bulletin leading up to the day of my surgery.

I know too that my almost total lack of memory for the routine events you would expect to experience on a hospital ward and which would have reassured me about where I was and what was happening, stopped me from challenging my warped and terrifying perception of the world. Whatever the future holds though, I'm never doing the washing on my birthday again.

"Perspective from LH" courtesy of Dr. Valerie Page, Watford Hospital, United Kingdom

One friend, a retired surgeon, told me I probably would see snakes climbing down the wall, or think one item is something horrible. Nothing like that has happened to me. I do remember thinking if I could only just bite through whatever that is in my throat, then I could breathe. I couldn't even swallow, that was one of the worst things. And not being able to breathe or to talk.

Even though I was only in one hospital the whole time, it seems to me I was in five different hospitals and one of them was on a train and one was in an airplane.

I survived and that is the main thing. And I am so grateful to God that I survived and am now off all oxygen and consider myself all well except that I can't remember to take my medications.

My words just won't come. I did lose for some weeks a lot of my speaking words. For instance, when I went to say the cancer was negative, I said: the cancer was naive.

My brain rehabilitation has been the word game Scrabble. I beat my best friend at Scrabble last Sunday. She probably won't tell anyone, as she usually wins. We are so very competitive and have great and grand games now, but it took a long while to get that back.

I was intubated and in the ICU for nearly 2 weeks. During that time I suffered severe delirium. The nurses told my family what was going on. My family in turn told me. I have been a social worker in health care for nearly 25 years. When I heard the term ICU delirium, I began refusing the sedating meds which I was offered on a regular basis. The absence of the drugs helped.

After being discharged home from a 29 day hospital stay, I noticed that I was having difficulty with concentration, word recall, ordering my thoughts, processing information, endurance and balance. All of these continue to be issues today. I have returned to work and have been able to continue to function independently. However, I just started another Masters program. I can do all of the necessary work, but during class discussions, when others can easily process the information and participate, it seems as though everything is stuck for me. I cannot process what's going on in class, and make insightful, relevant comments. The best I can do is to restate what has already been presented. I simply have a real problem organizing and pulling up data in my head.

I also had to have a hysterectomy as a result of my injuries. When I brought these mentation problems up to my doctors (and to the surgeon who I worked for at the time) I was told it was 'normal aging' or related to menopause. No one took me seriously.

I am very, very interested in participating in your research in some way. Working with you in some way, somehow gives my whole horrible experience meaning. Otherwise, it's as though I suffered all of this horror for nothing. I am also interested in making contact with others who have had similar experiences.

Impact on Functioning:Oh well, I survived Hell on earth, that’s for sure. That’s life. I worked very hard to get back on my feet because I didn’t want to have to ask much of people. I mean I couldn’t open bottles or clean litter boxes. But, I did manage to cook soups, get my cup of liquids, and do laundry. I think that is why I got rid of the walker and cane so fast—walking back and forth with food, drink, and laundry.

I do not believe in alien abductions. However, the terrified fear that such alleged abducts speak of seems not at all unlike the way I feel about my ICU experiences. The difference between alien abducts and delirious ICU survivors is that the former have the benefit of a widespread network of support groups. ICU survivors seem not to receive support or belief or sympathy that they have any medical condition at all now that they have allegedly recovered (aka not died). You must, in addition to the research you do, design a public education program which at the very least frees chronic ICU survivors with the feeling that at least the occasional person OR PHYSICIAN has a clue as to why something should continue to feel so wrong for so long a time.