Healthy nurse and mother-of-two who competes in Tough Mudder challenges almost dies of the flu – and it could happen to you
- Amanda Nix almost died of the flu in July after being rushed to a Sydney hospital
- Mother-of-two who competes in Tough Mudder challenges had felt sore, unwell
- She recalled having an heart beat and blacking out in hospital emergency ward
A healthy nurse and mother-of-two who competes in Tough Mudder challenges almost died of the flu.
Amanda Nix was rushed to Nepean Hospital in western Sydney last month after suddenly feeling exhausted and sore.
‘I was full aches, pains, fever. I couldn’t get up off the lounge. I was quite unwell,’ she told the ABC’s 7.30 program. ‘That’s when I kind of knew it was flu.’
Australia has been hit with a particularly bad flu season, with 383 people dying of the flu in 2019 so far, the Department of Health data showed.
A healthy nurse and mother-of-two who competes in Tough Mudder challenges almost died of the flu
In Ms Nix’s case, she called 000 after her heart began beating irregularly.
‘You are checking your pulse and it will go normal for a bit and then it will stop and it will go faster and it will slow down and so it’s like skipping beats as well,’ she said.
‘Yeah, it is strange picking up the phone and calling 000 because as a nurse, you wouldn’t normally do that unless you were serious.’
The nurse also revealed how her condition deteriorated as she was in the emergency room.
‘I was looking up at the roof and the roof just went really black and I got really dizzy,’ she said.
‘I had the nurse next to me at that point and I said, “I think you need to get some help. The room is going black.”
Amanda Nix was rushed to Nepean Hospital in western Sydney last month after suddenly feeling exhausted and sore
She declined to wake her two children, wanting to spare them from seeing her in such an unwell state.
Australia’s flu death toll for 2019 so far is more than double the fatality rate for all of 2018.
As of late July, 383 people had died of the flu, compared with 125 last year.
Influenza type A constituted the majority of flu deaths in 2019 with 85 being the median age of victims, official figures showed.
Associate Professor Benjamin Tang, an intensive care specialist from western Sydney’s Nepean Hospital, co-authored research into how the flu attacks the human body.
His work, published in the Nature Communications journal, found that being young and healthy was no guarantee of flu immunity.
Age, gender and whether someone had pre-existing illnesses made no difference to whether they suffered from a moderate or severe strain of the illness, his long-range study of 720 influenza patients from Australia, Canada and Germany found.
‘That immune system sometimes can be over-reactive or it can become so highly activated that it can start to cause damage to our own body tissue and that overreaction can happen whether you’re young or old,’ Dr Tang told Daily Mail Australia earlier this month.
‘Whether you have previous medical problem or you are previously fit and healthy.’
Australia has been hit with a particularly bad flu season, with 383 people dying of the flu in 2019 so far, the Department of Health data showed (pictured is flu survivor Amanda Nix competing in Tough Mudder challenge before she caught the potentially fatal illness)