Dutch Mantell recalls being given a 50/50 chance to live during recent medical emergency

On the latest "Storytime" podcast, Dutch Mantell explained his recent illness:

“It's hard to describe what happened. I was sitting at home. My birthday was on November the 29th and I couldn't stay awake. I kept like, nodding off, just going out. My daughter, Amanda, and thanks to hers is one of the reasons I'm still here. She said, ‘Are you, okay?’ She said I kept giving her gibberish answers that made no sense. She was looking at me funny and this continued for like an hour or two. Finally, she said there's something wrong and she called 911 and they came and picked me up and I don't even remember that. There's bits and pieces of this whole 26-day affair that I have no recollection of. Nothing. My daughter would tell me we'd be sitting in a hospital and she would say, ‘Do you remember this?’, and I said, ‘What?’ ‘Yeah, when you ran out of the room and did this and that’ and I said, ‘I didn't do that.’ ‘Yeah, you did.’ I said,’No, I couldn't have done that’, but there were things I just do not remember doing. I don't recall. I had an illness. It’s similar to, well it is sepsis.”

Dutch was asked how he developed this: “I don’t know. They don’t know, I don't think. It's an infection that gets into blood, I think, and it can spread to all your organs. It’s lethal. It can kill you. Then I found out later, not only did I have sepsis, but I had E. Coli too on top of that. So now I'm battling E. Coli. I must have had E. Coli first and it caused the sepsis. Let me highly advise not getting any one of these viruses or germs or whatever it is because it will knock you down to your knees. If I hadn't gone to the hospital, I wouldn't have made it. But the thing is, when I went to the hospital, I remember bits and pieces of that, but nothing was serious to me because I was laughing and I was kidding. I don't remember hurting, but I had a fever and I remember them around me and I was in and out of consciousness. (The fever) was like 103 I think, I guess. They didn't tell me a lot or they may have told me everything that I don't remember."

“After I got going a little bit and I got back to myself after about the 10th day in, I started reading up on it because I had my trusty phone and Google. So I started looking it up. Hell, I scared myself reading about it because if not attended to immediately, not two days later, three days later, if not attended to within the first 24 hours, you'll be dead in 72. It spreads that fast, and of course in reading this, I started reading about things like if one organ shuts down, the next organ’s gonna fall off soon because they have all this message system. I'm gone guys, I'm checking out, I'm shaking. Pretty soon, there's no organs left to keep you alive and you're just dead.”

"The way it came on, it came on suddenly. It came on fast, and I'm thinking you know, sometimes life has its own way of giving you curveballs to see if you can hit this and I dodged the bullet on this one. I went in on the 28th of November. My birthday was on the 29th of November, so I spent my birthday laying flat on my back in a hospital which is not fun. They put me in one place for a while and it was like a jail. I was actually looking for a way to kind of break out in my hysteria, in my ramblings, in my head, but it's locked down. You cannot get out. Then after about seven or eight days there, they did move me to, I wasn't in intensive care, but I had a room by myself and nobody bothered me. Just the nurses and the doctors came in and nobody else. I mean my daughter Amanda could get in there, but that's it. Strange case. It ever happened to me before. I don't want it to happen again. I don't want it to happen to anybody else, but I survived it and I guess that's the thing that counts.”

“I was given medicine every three hours. This is what I don’t remember. I was given a blood transfusion. I don’t remember that, so it had to be serious. They did give me, I think I remember they said a 50/50 chance. I think. Don’t mark me down on that being the truth. I could have just imagined that.”

"When I left, they gave me this big thing of medicine to take and it lists on it, Monday take this, in a little box that you open up so I don't get it confused and I just like that and I get a month's worse at a time. So I really can't get it confused that much because, I don't know about you, but I'm a bad organizer. I cannot organize anything, so unless they give it to me like that, I'm not gonna take it. Part of this illness may have been self induced because of me just not taking care of myself, but I'm here now, I recognize some of the mistakes I made, and I'm hoping that I don't make them again. I will say now I do feel good.”

If you use any portion of the quotes from this article please credit Story Time with Dutch Mantel with a h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription. Quotes were transcribed by Jim for WrestlingNews.co.