One more little victim of a killer doctors are ignoring
As the Mail fights to cut the toll of sepsis, a top TV actor and his wife tell their shattering story
From the outside, Jason Watkins and Clara Francis look like a couple who have it all. He’s one of Britain’s most acclaimed actors who starred in the BBC spoof show W1A and was awarded a Bafta for his role in the ITV drama The Lost Honour of Christopher Jefferies.
She’s a successful jewellery designer who, having trained as an actor, recently returned to the stage to rave reviews after a 12-year break. They have two beautiful children — Bessie, eight, and Gilbert, four.
But what outsiders don’t see is the black hole at the heart of their family, left by the loss of their youngest daughter, maude.
maude died, aged two-and-a-half, on New Year’s Day, 2011.
‘I think about her all the time,’ says Clara, ‘about what happened, what she’d be doing now. I’ll see a mother with two girls and I’ll think, “oh, that was me”, or I’ll see a pair of shoes like ones she had.’
maude fell victim to sepsis, a condition that claims the lives of 44,000 people in the UK each year, young and old.
Sepsis can develop rapidly following even the mildest of infections, such as a tummy bug or sore throat. For reasons little understood, the body’s immune system overreacts to the initial infection, attacking the its own tissues and organs.
If caught in time, sepsis can be successfully treated with antibiotics. But the NHS is failing to spot the signs, and every year tens of thousands of patients — including 1,000 children — die as a result of the condition.
Last month, the mail highlighted the tragic death of William mead, the one-year- old Cornish boy killed by sepsis in 2014 after warning signs were missed by doctors and the NHS 111 helpline.
Now, Jason and Clara are sharing their heartbreaking story in the hope it will save lives and help to jolt the NHS into action.
When Clara heard melissa mead talking about her son’s death on the radio last month, she ‘simply froze’. ‘I thought, “my God, it’s happened again.” I just sobbed.’
Such has been Clara’s pain that only now, five years on, is she able even to look at photographs of her child. But her grief is tempered with anger.
In January, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt apologised to the mead family, admitting that ‘our understanding of sepsis across the NHS is totally inadequate’.
Clara is telling her daughter’s story to help mr Hunt understand exactly how inadequate that response is. Speaking publicly about the loss of maude for the first time, she has a message for mr Hunt: ‘He must get his act together.
‘He must take sepsis seriously and spread the word about it among medical staff and recognise that this is a real problem.’
Like melissa mead, Clara and Jason are supporting the mail’s urgent call for a campaign to increase the public and medical professionals’ awareness of the dangers of sepsis, and for a radical improvement in the way the NHS tackles the condition.
‘If I’d known what to look out for, maude would still be here today — it’s as simple as that,’ says Clara.
The couple’s account of their daughter’s last days is a harrowing story that will make any parent’s blood run cold.
It began with a simple sniffle in the middle of December 2010. Two weeks later, their beloved maude was dead.
‘maude started to develop a sore throat and all those things parents are familiar with when their child has a cold,’ recalls Jason.
‘It went on for a week, but she wasn’t particularly bad — she had symptoms but she was playful.’
By December 30, 12 days since her first symptoms, Jason was worried that what he had thought was a cold was starting to go to maude’s chest.
He took her to their GP, who did all the things one would expect — checked maude’s chest, pulse and temperature — and said she had a throat infection.
But, as Jason opened the door to leave, something made him hesitate. ‘I said: “Are you sure we’ve done everything?”. She paused and said: “You know what? Take her to A&E.” ’
At University College Hospital, London, medics concluded it was probably croup, a common childhood viral condition. maude was given steroids to reduce the inflammation in her airways, then ‘they sent us home’, says Clara. The couple felt partially reassured, but still strangely uneasy.
By the following afternoon, maude was having serious problems breathing. Jason recalls: ‘She was faint, growing pale and becoming subdued and floppy, with a raised temperature and episodes of rapid breathing.’
Unknown to Jason and Clara, as it would be to most parents, maude was already showing telltale signs of sepsis. The window of opportunity for saving her life was fast closing.
At about 5pm on New Year’s Eve, they drove back to the hospital. Jason recalls that by this time ‘maude was having difficulties, she seemed to be losing consciousness and we were trying to keep her awake’.
Clara held maude on her lap as she gasped for air during the short but nightmarish journey.
‘I still believed she was going to be all right,’ says Clara. ‘I thought, “She’s only got croup, it’s fine.” ’
In hospital, maude did seem to improve. They took her temperature, X-rayed her chest and put her on oxygen, steroids and fluids through a drip. This time, she was given antibiotics for her throat infection.
She didn’t have the blood tests that would have revealed sepsis, and by that stage it was almost certainly too late for the antibiotics to have had any impact on the condition.
Her temperature started to fall and she ‘calmed down’, says Jason. ‘I was very relieved, watching her struggling had been awful.’
But he was surprised when, after a couple of hours, he was told he could take maude home. The diagnosis was unchanged — ‘a classic case of croup’.
‘I tried to remind them of the terrible symptoms she’d had . . . my instinct was that they should have monitored her through the night.’
Back home at about 10pm, maude
‘If we had known the signs, Maude would still be here today’
was ‘still not quite herself but she didn’t seem to be drastically ill,’ says Jason. ‘She was tired, but her colour had improved and she was a bit more chirpy.’
They put her in her cot and checked on her several times. ‘She was fine — not too hot, not too cold, sleeping and breathing normally.’
Finally, ‘ exhausted and traumatised’, they went to bed.
Clara’s last memory of her daughter alive is heartrending.
‘I said goodnight. She did this little thing we used to have where she’d touch my nose before she went to sleep . . . now I think I was putting her down and she was going to die and I should have known.’
one of the many cruelties surrounding maude’s loss is that Clara cannot shake the conviction
‘I was controlling my hysteria as I tried to revive her’
that she is somehow to blame. She pauses, as tears start to flow. ‘You have one job, to stop your child dying, and I couldn’t do that.’
Clara recalls very little of events the following morning, beyond Bessie coming into her parents’ bedroom at about 7am. In a quiet voice, still thick with shock five years on, Jason recalls Bessie saying: ‘I can’t wake Maude.’
What follows feels intrusive, a raw exposure of a family’s deepest, most painful wound. ‘But I think now’s the time to share it,’ says Jason.
‘It gives an idea of how awful this thing is and hopefully will sting other people into action.’
He continues in a faint voice: ‘I walked into her bedroom and saw her in the cot. She was lying face up. I knew she had died. She was cold. I think I was just calling her name. I remember my wife saying: “What’s the matter?” and I said: “I think she’s gone, I think we’ve lost her.”
‘Clara started howling and Bessie was asking: “What is it?” and somehow I was trying to make it like a game for her. I tried to revive Maude, but it was just awful, I knew she had died. I rang 999 . . . I couldn’t believe it . . .’
He gropes for words to describe the indescribable. ‘I was controlling my hysteria . . . at this point you’re not thinking about anything but trying to bring her back to life — you can’t believe it, it’s all wrong, please let this not be true.’
A paramedic arrived quickly and did everything he could, but ‘he just looked at me and said: “I’m afraid she’s gone.” ’ After that, Jason doesn’t remember much. He knows he went downstairs to tell Clara and Bessie. Then, because it was an unexplained death, the police arrived.
They were, he remembers, ‘ great, very compassionate. I came back upstairs and saw Maude again and just fell on the floor in front of these officers, who were clearly shocked and absolutely devastated themselves.’
He pauses. ‘This is horror,’ he says finally. ‘You feel terrible guilt. We must have done something wrong . . . of course, we didn’t, but part of you will always feel that.’
It was only at Maude’s inquest, seven months after her death, that they heard the word sepsis as the cause for the first time. Like many people, they had never even heard of the condition before.
The post-mortem examination revealed that Maude had contracted a bacterial infection as a complication
‘She was cold and lying face up. I knew she’d died’
of a common strain of flu; the infection had spread rapidly through her blood, provoking sepsis.
Jason doesn’t blame any individual for his daughter’s death. ‘I blame a system of care that does not entertain the idea of sepsis in a child displaying these symptoms,’ he says. ‘And more children have died because that dysfunctional system has continued.
‘That is inadequate and it is why I’m campaigning. If sepsis had been more in the ether, then the doctors would have been thinking about it and so would we.
‘Maude should not have died and — four whole years later — neither should William Mead.’
Jason and Clara are getting on with their lives, but celebrate Maude’s memory in everything they do.
When Jason won his Bafta in 2014 for his portrayal of Christopher Jefferies, the man wrongly accused of the murder of Bristol landscape
architect Joanna Yeates, he dedicated the award ‘to Maudie’.
In January 2014, Jason and Clara were married in what she recalls as a ‘ bittersweet’ ceremony, conducted by the same humanist minister who had performed Maude’s funeral.
‘I wanted her to be present, she should have been there,’ says Clara.
Clara wore a gold hare brooch she had made herself, which Maude had always loved and played with.
after Maude died, Clara made another hare for her ‘and we put it in her coffin, so she could take it with her’.
Jason and Clara had her name tattooed on their arms. Both say they are the least likely people to have a tattoo, but the gesture had powerful meaning.
‘I can’t bear the thought that she is going to be forgotten,’ says Clara, ‘that people will look at me and think I’m a normal person, because I am not.’ She became pregnant with Gilbert just three months after Maude’s death.
‘I needed to have another child. I didn’t even think about it — it was so primal, it was about survival.’
There was, she says, ‘a huge part of me that just wanted her back, if I’m honest. But I look at Gilbert now and I think, “Wow, you’re a total miracle”, and he is here entirely because of her.’
Understandably, she is on constant alert for any sign of trouble.
‘When either of my kids gets any sort of illness, I’ll go from being a normal human being to thinking they’re going to die, even if it’s something really minor. I think, “If it can happen once there’s no reason to believe it can’t happen again”, so I live in a permanent state of insecurity.’
In her darkest days, Clara found comfort in SLOW (Surviving the Loss of Your World), a group of parents who have lost children.
‘ I needed to speak to people who were further down the road, who had found a way of living,’ she says.
Five years on, now it is Clara offering solace to the newly bereaved. They will find, as Clara has, that there is no ‘getting over’ such a thing, and that it changes you forever.
‘I consider my life as split into two parts,’ she says. ‘There’s before Maude died, and after Maude died.
‘Before, I was innocent. I trusted the world, I trusted doctors, I trusted that if you were good, good things would happen to you.
‘I was wrong.’
Jason and Clara are raising money for the charity UK sepsis trust. For more information, visit justgiving.com/Jason-Watkins4Maude