How love helped me to win fight for life, by TV Charlie
EXCLUSIVE
TV PRESENTER Charlie Webster has revealed family is all that matters to her now, after her brush with death.
The former Sky Sports star was given 24 hours to live after contracting malaria during a bike ride in 2016.
Charlie, 35, had cycled 3,000 miles across Brazil and was meant to be fronting TV coverage of the Olympic Games in Rio. Instead, she was placed in a coma and told she was dying.
Two years on from her ordeal, she said: “The battles still go on in my head, but when you are in that situation you don’t give a damn about anything other than the love you have for other people.
“Now, I couldn’t care about my house, material things, what I wear. It just means nothing.
“The only thing that matters is to have that love, feel needed and cared for. To have it nearly end makes you realise what’s really important.”
Sheffi eld- born Charlie was bitten by a mosquito at the beginning of her epic ride but had not taken anti- malaria tablets after being told she did not need them. As well as the mosquito virus, she also got a condition called hemolytic uremic syndrome, a rare complication from a bacterial infection.
Within three days her kidneys had failed and within a week her lungs had collapsed. She was put on life support and dialysis.
Her heartbroken mother Joy raced to her bedside and was told her daughter was probably going to die.
Charlie said: “I was fi ne until I arrived and within 24 hours I was really severely ill. I was meant to be presenting the Olympics but ended up in the toilet on the fl oor haemorrhaging.
“Even when I did go into hospital for the fi rst couple of days I was still texting my agent saying, ‘ Tell them I’ll be in tomorrow.’
“Then, two or three days later, I was told I was going to die. I’ll never forget this guy pulling the curtain back and in broken English saying, ‘ We need to move you to another hospital immediately. Your kidneys have failed, your lungs are collapsing and we need to get you a blood transfusion. You are dying’. Then it kind of sunk in.”
She added: “My mum got told I had 24 hours to live. I was dying. They had to put a ventilator in because I had stopped breathing.
“Looking at my mum when she walked into the room and seeing her face was so distressing. I started to cry and wasn’t able to breathe.
“That’s when it hit me – I am going to die and I really didn’t want to.”
Charlie now plays an active role in the global fi ght to eradicate malaria, including working for the Commonwealth malaria campaign Malaria Must Die.