It was January 2023. Liz Power, wife of two-time Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach winner Will Power, was having fun with their son.
Then all heck broke loose.
“What initially happened was I was playing with our son, Beau,” said Liz, 42. “I threw him up in the air and I felt something pop in my back. We later found out it was an abscess in my back that I had and that is what ended up spreading into my spine, which was the staph infection.”
That was some two years and three months ago. Liz is still not the same as the near-death experience has left her with a weakened immune system, but she lived to tell about it and, for that, she’s more than a little thankful. As is her husband, who thought she might not make it through what at one point was a fever of 106 degrees.
“She pretty much died, like, she was that close,” said Will Power, the Australian two-time NTT IndyCar series champion who will be racing this weekend with Team Penske in the 50th Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach. “It was very, very close. Very lucky, actually.”
The details of the episode are downright scary. According to Will, Liz decided to take a shower after she felt the pop in her back. After a few minutes, he decided to check on her to make sure she hadn’t slipped, as she was already in pain.
That’s when he realized his wife was in trouble.
“I put my head in the door. ‘You OK?’ She goes, ‘Shhh, shhh, can you hear that?’ I’m like, “What?’ She goes, ‘Yeah, I can hear. I’ve been listening to the neighbors up into this speaker up there. I can hear them talking,’” Will said. “And so she started doing this sort of thing. I was like, ‘God, that’s weird.’
“And then when she got out, she got worse. Just total conversations all over the place. Just random stuff. Like totally hallucinating and just talking absolute gibberish. It got worse and worse and worse. Eventually, I called 911. There was something terribly wrong.”
The pain, Liz said, was brutal.
“Honestly, when Will called 911, I was … it’s funny, I remember everything I hallucinated, I remember everything,” she said. “But I also remember how much pain I was in, too. So at that point it was just, it was more like, ‘Just get me out of this pain,’ because it was so much pain I was going through. That was the biggest thing at that point.”
Doctors initially thought the infection might be in her stomach. An exploratory surgery disproved that.
“And then, it went on for days,” Will said. “It’s like, what’s going to happen here? I mean, they’re just pumping her full of antibiotics, doing everything they can for the fever. So clearly the infection’s still there.”
Doctors weren’t able to give Liz an MRI right away because she was hallucinating so much that she was pulling IVs out of her arms. But the eventual MRI disclosed something in her spine and she was rushed into surgery.
“Had to cut the top of the spine off and get all the infected stuff out, pull an infected disk out,” Will said. “Put rods and all that in, but she was on heavy, heavy antibiotics, like on a PICC line straight to the heart – IV style – because she was really struggling. Just destroyed everything in her body. And she was on that for months.”
Will said he was worried about possible brain damage because of how high her fever got – even once it was brought down from 106, he said it hovered over 104 for days before the surgery.
Will and Liz said doctors have not identified exactly why this happened, although Will believes it could have been from several surgeries Liz had after Beau was born because he came in at 9 pounds, 4 ounces at birth. Will said she should have had a C-section, but didn’t, referring to the birth as “bad management.”
“We’ll never know, but could have been all the surgeries she had after the birth of our kid,” Will said. “She had like four or five surgeries after that. And she had severe infection then and it could have just gone dormant. And they said like this last one, they said it could come back any time. They said it could come back years and years and years later, so it could have been that.”
Alas, Liz Power is here to tell her story, one that almost resulted in her early demise. Although she was initially told she would be on antibiotics the rest of her life, she recently came off them. But she’s changed.
“I’ve been doing good,” she said. “The only thing with that is my immune system isn’t what it used to be, so kind of like, what I’m going through now, I’m not 100%; I get sick.”
After this season’s IndyCar opener in St. Petersburg, Florida in March, Liz caught bronchitis, flu and the norovirus – all at the same time.
“It kind of hit me,” she said. “So that’s the only down thing.”
But she is ever positive, and grateful.
“I’m so much better than what I was and so to be here and be alive, as hard it has been and the toll that it has taken on my body … I’m going to get emotional about it because of the toll that it has taken – I’m here,” Liz said. “And what I have gone through, it seems terrible, but it’s not compared to what some other people … like, you know, it could always be worse.
“So to be able to get to be here, be with Will, see my little boy grow up, I mean, it really means … it’s a lot. It’s a God thing, I think, why I’m still here, and I’m good.”
Will nearly retired because of what Liz went through.
“It was really, really tough,” he said. “It was brutal. You got a little guy at home and I wasn’t getting the answers I wanted from the doctors and I wasn’t sure if she was going to make it. It was a terrible, terrible sort of feeling. Helpless, actually. …
“My thing was, I can’t risk racing if she’s not going to get better. I’ve got a kid at home.”
Hall of Fame driver Scott Dixon was honest, he and Will Power are not close. Still, when a fellow driver’s wife gets in this much peril, they come together.
“We don’t talk a lot, we have our differences,” Dixon said. “But I never want to see anyone go through any stuff like that. I don’t know all the details. I know she was sick. … It sounds like it’s kind of on the right road, which is great to see.”
Apparently, racing fans will continue to see a lot of Power, who at 44 isn’t yet considering retirement.
“Yeah, I haven’t put a timeline on it because I’m just driving so well still,” Will said. “I’m still so motivated and I love it so much. I’m working as hard as ever.”
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