Woman who beat 1 percent survival odds after flu urges vaccination

In 2009, Emelia Cowans-Taylor was confident about her health and just didn’t feel like she needed the flu vaccine.

“I was one of those people who felt like, ‘I’m good. I’ve got a regimen. It’s all under control,’ but when I left work that September, it was the latter part of September 2009, I didn’t come back until February,” she said.

Cowans-Taylor had the flu, and it came with a high fever. By the time she went to the hospital, she had double pneumonia and suffered acute respiratory distress.

“I mean, I was in critical care for a month and in a medically induced coma and on all three life support machines,” she said.

Cowans-Taylor’s family watched as her health declined. First, she was in WakeMed’s intensive care unit, and she was later moved to the critical care unit. That’s when doctors said she had only a 1 percent chance of survival.

Cowans-Taylor beat the odds, but what followed was survivor’s remorse.

“I asked myself constantly, ‘Why me?’ because that year, people that were younger than me and healthier than me died,” she said.

Since 2009, Cowans-Taylor has spoken about her experience to church groups and on television and radio programs. Because of the severity of the current flu season, Cowans-Taylor hopes to warn even more people about the risk of taking their health for granted.

“I don’t want anybody to go through what I went through: 30 days in a coma, another 30 days learning how to walk again, learning how to feed myself again,” she said. “But the flu shot is going to help you avoid going through what I went through.”

During the 2009-2010 flu season, H1N1 caused the first global outbreak by a new virus in more than 40 years, with the first cases appearing in the spring rather than the fall.

The current flu season is following a more typical path, but the H3N2 strain is proving to be just as severe and still has the potential to claim more lives, WRAL’s Dr. Allen Mask said.