The true love story behind a tragic new film
Tom Ray lost his limbs and face, but feels like the luckiest guy in the world, he tells
Tom Ray was busy making preparations for Christmas with his two-year-old daughter Grace in December 1999 at their East Midlands home. Music was playing, and Tom, a writer, was putting final touches to a homemade calendar.
“I had given up my job to become Rutland’s first house-husband,” says Tom, who had previously worked alongside his wife in their video production business. “We had a beautiful country cottage next to a lake – very sweet and peaceful.”
He stops. “Then within the space of six hours I sat on the sofa, and just started to die.”
It had started as stomach pains, and Tom thought he might have food poisoning. But then he began to deteriorate at a terrifying pace: he was violently sick, had blinding headaches, his skin grew mottled and pale, he became confused and anxious. “It was like being run over by a lorry, it was that fast,” he recalls. His wife, Nicola, was nine months pregnant with their second child at the time. She rushed to hospital with him, where baffled doctors ran tests to try and explain his plummeting blood pressure. Tom had developed sepsis, a condition caused by the body’s immune system going into overdrive as it tries to fight an infection, reducing blood supply and causing multiple organ failure.
Within a matter of days it robbed Tom of both his arms and legs, and left his face severely disfigured. Nicola gave birth to their baby, Freddy, while Tom was still in a coma, and he first saw his son through bandages two months later.
In total, he spent nine months in hospital following his collapse and returned home a quadruple amputee.
A later investigation found that the infection had been gained from a trip to the dentist when they nicked his mouth, coupled with a common chest infection.
Tom and Nic’s remarkable experience is the subject of new film starring Tom Riley (of
and Joanne Froggatt of which opened this weekend. Based on Tom’s diaries, it is a brutally honest a and account of ordinary people coping with the extraordinary – and a real-life love story.
Now 54, Tom is revisiting the events of his past to raise awareness of sepsis, a disease that affects 150,000 people in the UK a year and kills 44,000 – more than bowel, breast and prostate cancer combined.
In a pub near their house, he nurses a coffee with a prosthetic arm, which works by nerve sensors and has restored his ability to grip. His recovery, by any measure, has been heroic – he refuses to use a wheelchair, drives an adapted car and walks on prosthetic limbs.
When he came round three months after his collapse, he thought he had been in a road accident. Grace, then three, saw him, said “that’s not my daddy” and fled the room.
“For a long time, she wouldn’t come and see me,” he says. “You have to understand that they had taken most of my face off. I had no nose, no lips, no chin and all my cheeks were scraped off. You can’t really expect a child to cope with anything like that. I used to write her fairytales to keep the contact up, always with a twist where something in the family was a bit wrong.” By degrees, she came around.
Nic became his carer, helping him up the stairs, to eat and use the bathroom. With two young children and Tom to care for, she gave up work and soon bills were rolling in faster than their finances could cope with. The couple were forced to sell their house and move in with Nic’s mother, Jean. “It felt like a second tragedy,” she says.
There were other privations, too. “When Tom came back, he looked so different,” Nic says. “He smelt different. He didn’t have the shared memories [his memory was affected initially by the collapse]. I felt I was with a stranger. I was having to dress things and change tracheotomy tubes. Being a nurse is a bit of a downer.”
Tom agrees, but adds that although the relationship is “less physical”, “it is deeper in other ways”.
Ten years ago, a turning point was reached when Freddy, then six, kicked a ball over a wall and Tom fetched two ladders to climb into an electricity sub-station to retrieve it. It helped him realise he could still be useful to his family.
Now, Tom works at a call centre and is pursuing a fledgling career in public speaking. He and Nic have written a book about their lives and, despite the cruel hand he has been dealt, Tom is resiliently positive. As ever, it is Nic who he returns to.
“Because I‘ve been able to preserve this relationship, I would always say that I still feel the luckiest guy in the world.
“Not everyone gets the chance to be with the one person they wanted to be with. It gave me enough momentum to want to overcome the darkness.”
He looks at Nic and his face beams: “I wouldn’t swap with Tom Cruise.”