While He Was Sleeping

How Student Spencer Freeman's Brush with Death Changed the Course of His Life

On a summer night in 2016, Spencer Freeman was admitted to the ER, shaking and hallucinating, after an alcohol overdose left him with severe abdominal pain. Once there, Freeman learned that he not only had alcohol-induced pancreatitis, a potentially life-threatening swelling of the pancreas, but was also suffering from multi-organ failure and severe respiratory distress.

Freeman was put in a medically induced coma just days later, and for nearly a month, he lay unresponsive in his hospital bed. At some points he became so severely ill that his care team told his family to say their goodbyes. What made Freeman’s experience especially upsetting was the fact that, during his coma, he was never just lying there asleep. Instead, the month was filled with false memories that were painfully lifelike. 

“Some of them are years long,” he says. “I remember these memories more than I remember my own life.”

For instance, he has a vivid memory of his wife divorcing him and remarrying in Japan. The first thing Freeman did after waking from his coma was to check for his wedding ring—it was gone, but due to medical necessity, not because of divorce.

After waking from his coma that July, he spent the rest of the summer strapped to a hospital bed, so disoriented that he could barely separate the real from the imaginary. He experienced a number of dreamlike moments, including the feeling of stepping outside of his own body.

After leaving the ICU, Freeman still felt trapped in his time there. Even years later, he still has nightmares every night and throws up every morning. Reminders of his trauma are everywhere. The elevators at Rollins are identical to those at
the hospital.

It took years before Freeman felt able to speak about what happened to him in the ICU. But when he began sharing, he discovered a new path toward healing, connection, and advocacy. Now an MPH student in the Department of Health Policy and Management at Rollins, Freeman hopes his story can help others and lead to change.

Freeman’s confusion lasted nearly a decade until he heard a podcast by nurse practitioner Kali Dayton, DNP, about ICU delirium, where a combination of severe illness and heavy doses of medications like opiates and sedatives cause severe confusion, hallucinations, and delusions. Freeman emailed Dayton immediately to say he thought he’d been through this himself, amazed to learn that his experiences were part of a real, scientifically recognized condition.

From there, Dayton introduced Freeman to E. Wesley Ely, MD, co-director of Vanderbilt’s Critical Illness, Brain Dysfunction, and Survivorship (CIBS) Center, which focuses on reducing the harm patients experience in the ICU. When Freeman went to meet with Ely, the doctor’s empathy was astonishing—for the first time, a health care provider told Freeman that, rather than being buried, his story needed to be shared. 

From there, Freeman started working with patients at the CIBS Center, performing non-clinical duties like listening to patients and sitting at their bedsides. Ely also suggested pursuing a public health degree at Rollins. When he connected Freeman with Stephen Patrick, MD, Chair of Rollins’ Department of Health Policy and Management, the decision to go back to school felt like the obvious next step. Like Ely, Patrick saw value in Freeman’s story.

“Spencer’s willingness to share his story enables others to share their story,” Patrick says. “It enables them to know that those things matter.”

Freeman is now entering his second year at Rollins, where he’s studying health policy analysis with the goal of creating real change in how the medical system addresses delirium. Along with learning about the structure of the health care system in his courses, being a Rollins student has changed the way Freeman is able to work with real ICU patients.

“Rollins has provided me language to navigate my way through the system, build trust with providers, and then achieve the goal I had all along: reach the patients,” he says. 

Through this, he’s realized basic human connection is enough to change patients’ lives.

“Being useful doesn't always require having an answer,” he says. “Sometimes my job is to sit with somebody who is frightened and meet them where they are.”

Freeman plans to use his MPH to advocate for concrete changes in how delirium is addressed, with a focus on providing human-to-human support in the hospital. For example, Freeman believes delirium coordinators could be employed at hospitals to advocate for patients’ needs and make sure they’re being heard. He also wants to give patients’ experiences official recognition by building a pathway from delirium to a diagnosis of post-intensive care syndrome (PICS), a term for the trauma patients face after ICU stays. 

Freeman is currently advocating for PICS’ recognition as a patient liaison at Walk4PICS, which organizes walks to raise awareness about PICS. Freeman also hopes to improve provider education about delirium, which he’s working toward by speaking at conferences, co-authoring research papers, and talking to nursing classes at Emory, Vanderbilt, and other universities about delirium.

“[Spencer] has this unique story and incredibly unique skill set—that’s a gift to the world,” says Patrick. “I think it's incredibly inspiring when folks go through something traumatic and use that as fuel to make a difference for others. In a lot of ways, that's the essence of public health.”

Working with other patients has even helped Freeman heal from his own trauma. 

“We can connect on a level where I feel the opposite of alone,” he says. “The way you get people out of this suffering is to give them purpose. The only way I deal with all this pain is that I get to do something with it.”

Now, Freeman has two children, and he says his experience as a patient advocate has made him a better father. Instead of wanting his children to admire him, he just wants them to feel loved—and to understand that they, too, can make a positive impact on others.

Every day, Freeman tells his son the phrase, “do good and be good.” He says, “It’s our little reminder that being good is only part of the equation. Doing good, that's what matters most.”