Every scar tells a life story.

Alison Schuttloffel's story

The scars and missing toes are the reminder of how close she came to dying.

“The night I went in to The Prince Charles Hospital they put me in a coma and then it was touch and go for the next four or five weeks,” says Alison Schuttloffel. “I didn’t ever anticipate it was going to be like that. It was shocking really because no one knew swine flu was that bad.”

The 37-year-old Brisbane mother of five was sick for several days in July 2009 before realising she might have swine flu. The pathology backlog due to the pandemic meant she was sick for about 10 days before being hospitalised. Although she didn’t look particularly sick, Alison’s kidneys and liver were already struggling when she was admitted, she had pneumonia and very little lung capacity. Asking her mother to turn down an imagined heater in the car seat on the way to the hospital was the last thing she remembered until the end of August.

“I spent 52 days in The Prince Charles Hospital but I don’t remember about 90% of that time,” Alison says. “I had memory loss due to induced coma. It doesn’t feel real. It’s like you’re looking at a picture. It’s like I wasn’t really there.”

Alison was treated with ECMO – extracorporeal membrane oxygenation – which took her blood through a machine to force extra oxygen into her heart and lungs. She suffered frostbite on her hands and feet, causing some of the tissue to die.  “You can survive without hands and feet,” she says. “They had to focus on my heart and lungs to keep me alive.”

Husband Alex stayed by her side while she was in an induced coma for five weeks. Alex was told many times that Alison was unlikely to survive the night. There were times ICU staff sent Alex home to rest after days not leaving her bedside. The couple’s five children, aged from 2½ to 11 years old, remember needing gloves to visit, they were laregly protected from the severity of Alison’s illness.  “I think my four-year-old son was greatly affected by it,” Alison says. “He would say ‘You held my hand but you didn’t talk to me, Mummy.’”

Alison’s own memories of her seven and a half weeks at The Prince Charles Hospital are fragmented and fuzzy. She has some recall of physiotherapy, being on the tilt table when she wanted to lie flat, of terrible hallucinations and of hating rehabilitation.  Alison returned home in mid-September and was running her mobile hair extension business again by October, initially from her wheelchair.

“I just wanted to get out of there and get home,” she says. “I’m not a hospital person. That’s probably why I had problems getting in there in the first place. I didn’t want to go to hospital hence I was so far gone by the time I got here.”

Until December, Alison had twice-weekly physiotherapy and excruciating podiatry sessions to remove dead flesh from her toes, so painful she required anxiety medication and painkillers to get through the treatment. . “My toes were like they’d been dipped in tar,” she says. “It feels like you’ve got ants biting your feet because all the nerve endings are healing. I would have to shake my feet like a cat on wet ground.”

Although she doesn’t really remember the experience, Alison is grateful to the hundred or so people who treated her in ICU, in the wards, and in rehabilitation.  “Thank you to everybody for putting up with me and actually saving me and getting me here today,” she says.  “And here I was just thinking I’d have an upset stomach for a couple of days and I’d be right. But a week and a half later and then 52 days later I woke up in The Prince Charles Hospital.”