AGAINST ALL ODDS
Matthew Ames had his limbs amputated to save his life. A decade on, this remarkable father of four hasn’t missed a beat and continues to live a big, bright life
Matthew and Diane Ames are sitting at their kitchen table, telling a story in the way that people who have been together for a long time do – as a duet. Dipping in and out of each other’s sentences, they recount the moment 10 years ago when Matthew first registered the aftermath of what a streptococcal toxic shock infection, which in turn led to sepsis, had on his body.
The moment when he lowered his eyes to his torso, and then looked over to Diane by his hospital bed and mouthed the words,
“No arms? No legs?”
“And I was sort of, ‘Oh for goodness sake, Matthew, we’ve gone through this, I’ve told you this three times’,” Diane says. With mock exasperation. With fondness.
“But in my head, I was thinking, ‘So when you said no arms, no legs you really meant no arms, no legs’,” Matthew says, and they both begin to laugh. And it is there, in that shared laughter, where the answer is found to how this man has continued to live his life after a sore throat 10 years ago would change it forever.
This is the second time Matthew Ames has graced a Qweekend cover; the first time was in 2013, a year after surviving sepsis. The condition occurs, according to the Australian Sepsis Network “when the body’s response to an infection becomes harmful. Infection causes your immune system to release chemicals into your blood to fight the infection. In severe cases of sepsis, one or more organs fail. In the worst cases (known as septic shock), sepsis causes the blood pressure to decrease to dangerous levels and the heart to become weaker. Once this happens, multiple organs may fail quickly, and the patient may die”.
In Matthew’s case, it was the streptococcal bacteria that caused a sore throat that penetrated his bloodstream, causing septic shock. And he not only survived it, and the subsequent loss of all four limbs, but since that time, he has done everything that it was thought he couldn’t, or at least most likely wouldn’t. Go to work. Drive a car. Travel. Watch his kids grow up. Live. Because in June, 2012, when doctors at South Brisbane’s Mater hospital told Diane that her husband’s only chance of living was quadruple amputation, they also explained that even with this most brutal of interventions, his chance of survival was one per cent. And so, on June 17, 2012, after the couple’s children – Luke, then 8, Ben, 7, Will, 6, and Emily, 2 – were called into the hospital to say goodbye to their father, Diane watched as her partner of 22 years was wheeled into surgery just a week after he first mentioned a sore throat.
Today, at their kitchen table in their l Camp Hill Queenslander home, the couple looks back at how far they’ve come since Matthew was given his one per cent shot, and took it.
“When it all happened, I’d been travelling with work and when I got home I had a bit of a sore throat, so I went to the GP, who said it was most likely a cold, so I went home and went to bed,” Matthew, now 49, recalls.
“But over the weekend I felt worse, I’d started getting temperatures, and I was pretty dehydrated. But I soldiered on that week until June 10, when Di and I were having an anniversary dinner on the Saturday night. I felt pretty bad so I went to the Mater’s Emergency Department and they thought it was a cold or a flu and also gave me some anti-nausea medication. The first time I saw I had a bit of a rash on my arm was on that Sunday night.”
Diane, 49, adds “Because we’d been told it was a cold, we hadn’t been looking for a rash at all. But Matthew kept getting worse, and on Tuesday night we called an after-hours doctor, who also thought it was probably just a cold, so we still weren’t panicking, and then on Wednesday morning Matthew was just really struggling to move around.”
Matthew says, “I had to be supported in and out of the car to get to the GP and this time I was sent for a blood test. The rash had spread up his arm – there were, as Diane says now – “so many warning signs”.
Matthew went back to the doctor who thought it might be Ross River fever and, once more, Matthew Ames was sent home. That night, he says he felt like he was “in a whole lot of trouble” and presented at the Mater’s Emergency Department once more. He had sought help four times in one week. “I was going through everything that had happened in the last few days with a nurse there, all the symptoms I had.”
It is the last thing Matthew can remember doing before waking up weeks later.
It all happened, Diane says, so quickly. Matthew’s blood pressure plummeting while talking to the nurse. Consultants coming in. Doctors trying to put in a central line. Someone saying, “We’re taking him to the ICU.” She remembers ringing his parents, Roy and Christine, and sisters Kate and Rachel. She remembers Matthew’s family at the hospital supporting her decision for the amputations.
But mostly she remembers thinking about
how she was going to tell the man she had met on the first day of university, what had happened. It was, she says, “the first major decision I had ever made without him”.
Matthew and Diane met at the University of Queensland as first-year engineering students, both getting their student identification cards laminated.
They became, and stayed, friends until Matthew asked Diane to their first year engineering ball, and they have been together ever since, side-by-side for 32 years.
They married in Brisbane’s St Stephen’s Cathedral in 1995, and for the first 10 years of their marriage, they travelled extensively before having their four children, Luke, now 18, and also at UQ studying finance economics, Ben 17, in year 12, Will, 16, and Emily, 12. Matthew held several executive roles in environmental and energy corporations, and they had a big, bright
life right up until the moment he got that scratchy throat.
Actually, scratch that. They still do.
After the surgery, Matthew lay in an induced coma for three and a half weeks, the surgical and medical team warning Diane what to expect when he woke up.
“They said he will be in a deep, dark depression for months, because when people have an amputation of one limb, it is extremely hard to accept and he’s had four.”
Staff and social workers coached Diane how to break the news to her husband once he woke up. Which she did. But each time he was brought out of his induced coma, his blood pressure plummeted, and he was once more put back under. This is the origin of the marital teasing between them; that she had told him three times of his limb loss before it sank in.
“When it did sink in, I remember Di apologising over and over but, being a rational engineer, I just remember thinking, ‘Okay, that all makes sense now, why I was so unwell.’ But yes, it was difficult to process, and I just had to follow Di’s lead that everything was going to be okay.”
Matthew Ames only cried once when he was in hospital. Not when Diane told him he’d lost four limbs, not when he saw his body for the first time post sepsis. He cried when he learnt that on the night of his surgery, his children had been brought into say goodbye. But after those tears, acceptance. “And then there was a point of just recognition, of just ‘Okay this is what it is. I’ve got nothing’.”
Fifty-five days in the intensive care unit. Seven months in rehab. Nine months in hospital in total. The gym six days a week, up to twice a day. Learning how to breathe again off a ventilator. Then to swallow. Then to talk. Then the hardest part of all, to move. To get his body going again. To move around in the bed. To rock. To throw himself sideways – “I remember the first time I did it I was so excited I landed on my face” – to sit up without falling down. To shuffle laps of the gym on his bottom. The first attachment of prosthetics. Arms, then legs. Pain. Frustration. The attachments felt clunky. Heavy.
“The prosthetics I had were not really working for me,” Matthew explains, “It’s pretty rare with quadruple amputees (whose close-knit members around the world, by the way, call themselves the Quad Squad). There’s only seven of us who are, like me, bilateral, or above the elbow, who use prosthetics. Losing an elbow is hard, because it changes the body mechanics, it’s a hinge. My first prosthetics didn’t have wrist units, I couldn’t bring things to my mouth. The legs were very difficult too because they were socket-based prosthetics, there’s nothing really for them to hold on to, and being a bloke it was just unbelievably painful. I persevered for a while, but I was just not willing to stay there.”
And so, he began to look for alternate options, and found them in a technique called osseointegration, wherein a titanium implant is integrated with the bone, then the prosthetic is attracted to a bolt protruding from the implant.
In June, 2013, Ames started the long process of the multiple surgeries required to receive his four implants, performed by an osseointegration team based out of Melbourne’s Alfred Hospital. Two years later, he received his first set of bionic arms in June 2015. Far more functional than his original set, the bionic prosthetics mean he can bring food or a drink to his mouth, and they are also, he smiles, “far more comfortable”.
In 2015, Matthew received a set of legs, known as “Stubbies” – short, metal rods which he had to learn to walk on. It was a slow, laborious, painful process and it was not until 2018 that he was able to fully bear weight and walk unassisted on them. He is now working with a new set of bionic legs which are longer and give Ames greater height. The plus side, he says, is that he is taller, and has greater stride length, the downside is he has further to fall.
All of this means that, 10 years down the track, Matthew Ames can walk, climb stairs, drive a car, take his kids to their potpourri of school and sporting events and, perhaps most importantly, he can hug them.
Matthew Ames is a singularly courageous man, one who rarely talks about it, but still lives with pain from his phantom limbs every day.
Asked if there is anywhere on his body he doesn’t feel pain, he’ll think about it for a few moments, then answers “my face”. And yet, if you ask him if he has ever, for one second, questioned Diane’s decision all those years ago, his answer is unequivocally no.
Because he’s still here, watching his kids grow up, living his big life, working as chairman of the Hear and Say board, as a board member of Bionics Queensland, a council member of Centrecare and collaborating with Queensland Health, and the Australian Sepsis Network in raising awareness of sepsis, and the identification of its symptoms.
This last role is particularly important to him, because no one knows better than Matthew Ames how sepsis can strike randomly and how easily it can be missed. How important it is to know the symptoms and ask, “Could this be sepsis?” Because, almost unbelievably, four years ago, the Ames’s middle son, Ben, got it.
“There was no temperature, but he wasn’t himself, but he was lethargic and there was just a general malaise,” Matthew says.
“He started to be in a bit of pain and we thought ‘let’s just get him to the Children’s Hospital’.” Their instincts were correct – Ben had a ruptured appendix, and by the time they got to hospital, a rash had appeared and the young boy was turning blue.
“They took him into surgery to operate on his appendix and then they had to clean out all the infection that had turned septic and to pump him full of antibiotics,” Matthew says.
It has taken a village to put Matthew Ames back together again, and to raise the initial funds for all the equipment he needed at home.
Now back on his feet he says what happened to him has afforded him “a rare glimpse of the humanity that still exists in the world”. But what he is most grateful for can be found in this house, at this kitchen table, with his wife laughing opposite him, and his kids coming and going, everyone just getting on with this business called life.
When people have an amputation of one limb, it is extremely hard to accept and he’s had four
with
Itwas an inspirational networking lunch when Tracey Osmond took the stage at the Townsville Business Women’s Circle JCU Business Bites event as guest speaker.
Tracey is a familar face in Townsville as the lead singer of popular corporate band Abbey Road, as well as the director of The Voice Singing School.
The next JCU Business Bites event will be held November 3 at the Rockpool Pavilion between 7am and 8.30am.
The guest speaker will be James Cook University’s Director of Conflict
Management and Resolution Claire Holland.
The business women’s circle’s JBD Christmas Party will be held November 25 between noon and 3pm at the Rockpool Pavilion, with tickets to include a two course lunch, a glass a bubbles on arrival as well as raffle prizes to be won and a lucky door prize.
Go to tbwc.com.au to get tickets for both events.