Now YOU can fight back against sepsis
As Lord Ashcroft pledges his support to raise money for a vital campaign, the truly heart-rending stories that highlight the devastating effect of adult sepsis — and what you can do to help
One of the last memories Melanie Rothner has of her father is of him giving her a cheery wave from his hospital bed. ‘Dad was sitting up laughing and joking, and he blew me a kiss as I left the room,’ she says. Mike, a popular dentist, who at 62 was looking forward to a long and happy retirement, had been taken to hospital by ambulance after suffering from what initially appeared to be a bad dose of norovirus, the winter vomiting bug.
none of his family — Melanie, 39, her mother Christine and sister Marie-Anne, 34 — had any idea how ill he was. For within hours of that cheery wave, he started struggling to breathe and his family were ushered in to see him.
‘The doctors were saying he needed to go on a ventilator to allow his lungs to rest,’ says Melanie, 39, a brand development manager from newport, Shropshire.
‘They weren’t sure what was going on and had to concentrate on treating the symptoms.
‘They brought us in to speak to Dad and he jokingly told off Mum for speeding behind the ambulance. He asked if she’d got his suitcase packed so he could come home the next day.
‘He knew he was very ill, but he was making light of it.’
That was the last time any of the family spoke to him. Soon after, he was put into a medically induced coma, but doctors couldn’t save him. A few hours later, the ventilator that was helping him breathe was switched off and Mike died — leaving his family stunned by the speed of it all.
‘Twenty-four hours before it had been just a normal day and Dad had a stomach bug,’ says Melanie. ‘We didn’t understand how this could have happened.’
What had happened was that Mike had become yet another victim of sepsis.
The fast-moving condition occurs when the body’s immune system overreacts to an infection, caused by anything from a cut finger to flu, and starts attacking its own tissues and organs, as well as the invading bugs.
If spotted in time, the deadly condition is easy to treat with antibiotics. In Mike’s case, the clues were there, but no one — neither the doctors treating him nor Mike, who as a dentist was medically trained — realised he had sepsis until it was too late.
BEFORE he fell ill, Mike had been busy planning scuba diving holidays and trips in his campervan with Christine, also newly retired from her job as a dental nurse.
‘They were devoted to each other and Dad had a real zest for life, regularly running half marathons as he wanted to stay healthy in old age,’ says Melanie.
Mike’s sepsis may have been prompted by a chest infection he had developed in late 2014.
‘He’d not seen his doctor as he didn’t think it was serious enough,’ says Melanie. ‘But in early January he felt run down and thought he was coming down with flu. He also had bad diarrhoea as well as pain and swelling in his legs, so he saw his GP the next day.’
The doctor put his symptoms down to norovirus, told him to rest and to increase his fluid intake.
But the following day, Mike was being sick and his leg had swollen to the point where it was dragging when he walked.
This time, his wife insisted on calling out the GP for a home visit and when Mike suddenly developed breathing difficulties the doctor called an ambulance. ‘ By the time Dad got to hospital, his body was covered with a purple, mottled rash,’ says Melanie.
‘I was shocked at how old he suddenly looked. He also told doctors he hadn’t passed urine at all that day.’
Melanie now knows that mottled skin and a failure to pass urine are two classic signs of sepsis.
But at the time, the doctors at the hospital thought Mike had developed a deep vein thrombosis (DVT) and proceeded to treat him with clot-busting drugs.
The cause of death was listed as DVT, but blood tests later revealed Mike had a strep A bacterial infection (a common cause of throat infections), which led to sepsis and heart failure.
‘of course, we’ll never know if Dad would have survived if he’d been given the right antibiotics earlier,’ says Melanie.
‘But we do want more doctors and members of the public to be made aware of the symptoms of sepsis. My father was medically trained, yet sepsis still didn’t cross his mind.’
Sepsis kills 44,000 people in Britain every year — more than deaths from bowel, breast and prostate cancer combined — and leaves 100,000 people seriously ill, many with life- changing injuries such as amputated limbs or irreversible damage to organs.
And yet the condition and its symptoms are largely unknown to the public and poorly recognised even by many doctors.
Last year, the Daily Mail launched a campaign to ‘end The Sepsis Scandal’ following the revelation that one- year- old William Mead, from Penryn, Cornwall, died in 2014 because a series of doctors had overlooked telltale signs of sepsis.
In December, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt announced plans to retrain doctors and nurses to spot the signs of sepsis in children, and to distribute a million leaflets and posters throughout GP surgeries, maternity wards and hospital Casualty departments.
As we revealed in the Mail last week, the UK Sepsis Trust is building on that success to raise awareness of the threat to adults — and the charity hopes to raise sufficient funding for such a campaign.
‘This will encourage people to seek medical attention early and just ask: “Could it be sepsis?” ’ says Dr Ron Daniels, chief executive of the UK Sepsis Trust and an nHS consultant in critical care.
The charity’s fundraising efforts have been given a huge boost by Lord Ashcroft, the author, businessman and former deputy chair of the Conservative Party, who is a sepsis survivor.
In September 2015, Lord Ashcroft became ill with a bout of vomiting, which he put down to food poisoning.
The next day, he flew to the Caribbean for a business meeting and, feeling no better, went to a small clinic on the island of Providenciales. Fortunately, a doctor there recognised his symptoms as sepsis and Lord Ashcroft was flown to a hospital in the U.S., where he spent 19 days in intensive care.
REMARKABLY, though it was touch and go, he escaped from his ordeal unscathed — and knows just how lucky he was.
In January, Lord Ashcroft tweeted the list of sepsis symptoms with an offer to give £1 to the UK Sepsis Trust, up to a total of £50,000, every time it was retweeted.
That target was soon hit, and now he’s offered to match every pound raised by the charity up to £250,000. ‘I don’t want what happened to me to happen to others, and the importance of catching this little known, but highly dangerous, condition early cannot be over-emphasised,’ he has said.
While sepsis can strike anyone at any age, Dr Daniels says there are certain groups who are more vulnerable, either because they are more prone to infections or because their immune system is under-performing.
Among the at-risk groups are those who are over 55, like Mike Patterson. After this age, the immune system weakens, meaning people should be alert to sepsis if they develop an infection or are admitted to hospital for surgery.
others at higher risk include those taking medication that
reduces immunity ( such as steroid drugs or chemotherapy), pregnant women and people with diabetes. These groups — and their loved ones — should be especially vigilant.
‘Bacteria can thrive in the sugarrich environment when blood sugar is not properly controlled,’ says Dr Daniels. ‘ And diabetes can affect the body’s white blood cells, reducing immunity.’
However, not everyone is being made aware of the heightened risk they face, and Charles Martin, known as Chic, is a case in point.
The father-of-three from Balloch, West Dunbartonshire, was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes 17 years ago. As a result, his wife, Donna, says she was ‘ always watchful of his health’.
‘He had regular “hypers” and “hypos” where his blood sugar went too high or too low, and sometimes he’d ended up in a coma in hospital,’ she says.
Yet until her husband’s death from sepsis in 2014, she had never heard of the condition. ‘The first I heard about it was when the consultant in charge of Chic’s care handed me a leaflet about sepsis just before he died in intensive care,’ says Donna.
The first sign something was wrong, she says, was in November 2014. ‘Chic felt rotten and thought he had flu. I wondered if he might be coming down with a bug the boys had all had.’
The next day, her husband struggled to eat his favourite soup, and then started being sick. When she found him asleep in the bath, Donna called the NHS helpline.
‘The nurse seemed to seize on the fact he had a history of diabetic episodes and said I should just carry on testing his blood sugar throughout the night. But I didn’t like it. I knew this wasn’t how he behaved when he had a diabetic complication.’
The next morning she called an ambulance, and he was put on a ventilator in intensive care.
‘He went downhill very quickly,’ says Donna. ‘It was so scary.’
It was only when he had a series of heart attacks, as his organs stopped working, that the consultant ordered a blood test that showed he had sepsis.
‘The following day, they turned off the ventilator and 16 minutes later he was dead,’ she says.
TODAY, Donna is still coming to terms with his death. ‘ I’m not bitter or angry, but I can’t understand why the doctors weren’t aware of the extra risk of sepsis for people with diabetes. Why wasn’t it on their radar?
‘ If he’d been diagnosed and treated with antibiotics sooner, he might still be here.’
What stands out in many cases of sepsis, says Dr Daniels, is that patients and relatives often know something is seriously wrong: they just don’t know what it is.
That was the case with Jo Atrill, 39, a former primary school teacher from Illminster, Somerset.
She suffered recurrent painful kidney infections while pregnant with her son Alex, now 13, but when she went to A&E, ‘they made me feel as if I was making a fuss’. Eventually she was admitted and found to need an operation to remove a blockage in her urethra, the tube that takes urine out of the bladder — leaving her with an external bag to collect the urine.
As someone who was undergoing surgery and pregnant, Jo was at increased risk of sepsis. This is partly because pregnancy dampens the immune system.
A week after surgery, she began to feel shivery, with aches and pains. Again, she found the doctor dismissive. ‘He gave me two days of what he called “prophylactic antibiotics” — the implication being he didn’t think I had an infection — and sent me home.’
Three days later, she felt she had ‘the worst flu ever’. Her then husband said she was grey and took her to A&E, where she collapsed. A nurse rushed to help and doctors saved her life by injecting antibiotics directly into her veins.
‘Had it been an hour later, I would not have lived,’ she says.
But sepsis has had a lasting impact on Jo and her family: her son Alex is brain damaged and has multiple disabilities.
‘I’d had such a raging infection it caused his brain to swell,’ says Jo. ‘Life has been so hard for him, and I used to get angry on his behalf. If I’d allowed the anger to continue, I’d have been eaten up by it all.
‘But if I had known then what I do now, I would have spent more time yelling at the doctors. If I had, then my life and my son’s life would have been very, very different.’