“I Owe Them My Life”
It was an evening in November of 2022 when 48 year-old Betty McEachern came to the Dartmouth General Hospital Emergency Department. She’d been having trouble breathing and felt she may need antibiotics.
“I got there around 8 and I think around 1:30 in the morning I started to feel something internally shift and I felt like I was in panic mode,” says Betty.
She was taken for assessment and was preparing for an x-ray when everything went black.
“When I woke up, I was on life support in the ICU, and obviously happy to be alive,” says Betty. “I’m sure I would have died that night if they had not intervened.”
A combination of pneumonia, asthma and anemia meant Betty had been suffering from impending respiratory failure.
“I’m so thankful for the healthcare team,” Betty says. “I owe them my life.”
Betty was able to return to her work as a school library support specialist a few weeks later. She’s now writing her own book, a creative memoir exploring this lifesaving but also life changing experience.
“I would say I was always a planner and I was always thinking about the future,” says Betty. “I realize it’s great to plan for the future but now I live each day in the present, in the moment, in a way that I never did before.”
Betty says she also wants to put in print how thankful she is for her experience at Dartmouth General.
“Every staff member I came in contact with was phenomenal,” says Betty. “I was in the ICU, they admitted me technically on Thursday morning and I walked out of there on Sunday. I want to come forward and say thank you to the healthcare workers and for the culture at Dartmouth General Hospital.”
