“I feel like any one of her friends would have done that. “I don’t feel I did, and I stand by that to this day,” she said. “She’s by far one of my favorite people,” she said. Gray agrees that Luhrs is the reason she’s alive. “They all told me, all along the way, ‘you know, your friend saved your life,’” Gray said. Gray, who has worked for Vanderbilt on and off for 32 years and had never been an inpatient, spent the better part of a week in Vanderbilt University Hospital, most of that time being treated by the medical professionals in the Surgical Intensive Care Unit (SICU). It turned out Gray had a kidney stone, but worse yet, she had sepsis because of the fluid built up behind the stone and was dangerously close to death. And then they put smelling salts under my nose, and said ‘we need to move her now.’” “And my blood pressure was like 40-something over 30-something. “So she let herself in and forced me to get dressed and drove me to the emergency room,” she said. “We’re going to the hospital, and that’s just the bottom line.” “They all told me, ‘you know, your friend saved your life,’” Gray said. “And I got to her house and she was as white as a sheet, and at that point I told her there is no getting over this, we’re going,” Luhrs said.
#CALL ERICA FULL#
She decided to drive over to Gray’s home the next morning and let herself in with the spare key Gray gave her - even though it meant scuttling a full day of plans including a birthday party and her son’s karate event. “Something didn’t feel right,” Luhrs said. Meanwhile, Luhrs was becoming increasingly uneasy. “I just remember saying ‘I’ll be fine, I’ll take a nap, I’ll wake up, everything will be fine,’” she said.īut she wasn’t fine after a nap, and she wasn’t fine after a full night of sleep. “I said, ‘well, why don’t you take a bath? Why don’t you put on a heating pad? Something, anything,’” Luhrs said. Luhrs, a lead administrative assistant in the department, got on the phone with Gray afterward and was becoming very concerned.
The pain turned into nausea and only got worse. She’d had the pain before, but ignored it. Gray, manager of the clinical administrative team for the Department of Anesthesiology, was working from home, leading a Zoom meeting in February when she experienced “this incredible sharp pain” in her lower right back. Luhrs turned out to be right, and she saved Gray’s life. Her friend and co-worker Erica Luhrs wasn’t buying it. Photo by Donn JonesĬhristi Gray said she was just having a backache. Gray’s friend Erica Luhrs, third from left, was credited with saving her life. Deia Cooper, RN, BSN, left, and Wilson Fernandez, RN, BSN, right, cared for Christi Gray, second from left, when she was a patient in Surgical Intensive Care.
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