Heartbreaking stories that prove sepsis kills grown-ups too
It’s more deadly than bowel, breast and prostate cancer put together. After our campaign highlighting its dangers to children, the fight goes on . . .
This is a tale of two victims of sepsis, the ‘silent killer’ that each year claims the lives of 44,000 people in Britain and leaves another 100,000 with permanent, life- changing injuries, from irreversible damage to internal organs to amputated limbs.
One of them is Liz Frood, a 41-year- old mother and Egyptologist at Oxford University, who in August 2015 was suddenly struck down with what she thought was a mere tummy bug.
The other is Luke hendrick, a 37-year-old father and drugs and alcohol counsellor from sidmouth, Devon, who developed a sore throat in July 2014.
They fell prey to sepsis, the fastmoving condition that occurs when the body’s immune system overreacts to an infection, caused by anything from a cut finger to the flu, and starts attacking its own tissues and organs as well as the invading bugs.
Neither Liz nor Luke knew what was happening to them: sepsis and its symptoms are largely unknown to the public and poorly recognised even by many doctors.
The tragedy is that the condition is easily treated with a prompt dose of antibiotics, but all too often it’s missed, with terrible consequences — as Liz and Luke’s stories graphically illustrate.
For Liz, who survived, the price of late diagnosis was the loss of both her legs, which turned gangrenous and had to be amputated below the knees on september 22, 2015, a month after she became ill and the day after her son Emeran’s first birthday.
Nevertheless, the plucky New Zealander says: ‘i was lucky.’ her son will grow up with a mother.
Luke was tragically unlucky. Despite four attempts to get help from three GPs and, near the end, a desperate visit to A&E, no one thought to give him antibiotics for what turned out to be a serious bacterial throat infection.
had they done so, he might have survived.
AS IT WAS, his doctor gave him nothing more effective than paracetamol and, as the infection spread, causing him weeks of increasing agony in his leg muscles (a sign of sepsis), his pain was written off as a trapped nerve.
Near the end, when he began slurring his words — another of six classic signs — people who spoke to him, including his father Laurie, thought that he was uncharacteristically drunk.
A few days later, he found Luke dead in the hallway of his flat, his keys and his shopping still in his hand.
his six-year-old son, Dalton, will grow up without his father. Luke’s parents were left grief- stricken, bewildered and angry. ‘Luke’s death need not have happened,’ says Laurie, 62, a former soldier. Each year thousands of families in similar circumstances face similar, needless heartbreak.
Last year the Daily Mail’s ‘End the sepsis scandal’ campaign was launched 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.
william’s mother, Melissa, has campaigned tirelessly with The Uk sepsis Trust to raise awareness of the condition, and other courageous parents have come forward to share their tales of unspeakable loss in the hope that others might be spared the agony they have endured.
Last December, health secretary Jeremy hunt announced plans to distribute a million leaflets and posters throughout GP surgeries, maternity wards and casualty departments, and to retrain doctors and nurses to spot the signs of sepsis in children.
Now The Uk sepsis Trust, backed once again by the Mail, is building on that success to focus on the threat to adults from the deadly condition.
Each year sepsis claims more lives than bowel, breast and prostate cancer combined, and the charity hopes to raise enough funding for an awareness campaign for adults.
‘This will encourage people to seek medical attention early and “Just Ask: could it be sepsis?” ’ says Dr Ron Daniels, an Nhs consultant in critical care and chief executive of The Uk sepsis Trust.
The charity’s fundraising efforts have been given a terrific boost by Lord Ashcroft, the author, businessman and former deputy chair of the conservative Party, and himself 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 Turks and caicos islands in the caribbean for a business meeting and feeling no better, went to a small clinic on the island of Providenciales.
Fortunately, a doctor recognised his symptoms as sepsis and Lord Ashcroft was quickly flown to a hospital in the U.s., where he spent 19 days in intensive care.
Remarkably, he escaped from his ordeal unscathed, and knows just how lucky he was.
‘ Few things could be more harrowing than the stories of small children whose young lives have been cut short by sepsis,’ he says.
‘Thanks to The Uk sepsis Trust, awareness of the telltale signs of this dreadful condition in children is being raised among medical professionals and parents alike, which will save many lives.’
But it is important, he says, to remember that ‘sepsis can strike anyone, at any age. i discovered this the hard way, which is why i am supporting the trust in the next stage of its campaign to draw attention to the danger of sepsis among adults.
‘Quite simply, 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 overemphasised.’
BACK 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. The target was soon hit. Now he has offered to match every penny raised by the charity up to £250,000.
This new campaign has the backing of Melissa Mead. ‘sepsis is an indiscriminate condition and affects adults, too,’ she told Good health. ‘Everyone needs to be aware of the symptoms.’
That’s a sentiment endorsed by Liz Frood. Until she was struck down, neither she nor her husband, christoph, an archaeologist, had even heard of sepsis.
‘i still can’t quite believe that something so catastrophic could happen so suddenly,’ she says. her first sepsis symptom, which occurred shortly after sitting down to an evening meal, was violent shivering like nothing she’d ever experienced before. ‘i couldn’t even hold a fork,’ she says.
it was quickly followed by nausea and vomiting.
she went to bed, thinking she had flu, but the next day felt even worse. The shivering had given way to muscle pain — a sepsis symptom — and her hands and feet started to tingle (starved of oxygen, skin and muscle at her extremities were already beginning to die).
By the evening her feet were so numb and her legs so painful she couldn’t stand and christoph had to carry her to the bathroom to be sick. ‘ At some point — i don’t remember this, but christoph does, vividly — i told him i was dying, and i was,’ says Liz.
The feeling that death is imminent is another sepsis symptom. At 2am, christoph called for an ambulance. it was two days since Liz’s violent shiver-
ing began and this delay could have cost Liz her life. But fortunately, at A&E at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, she was given antibiotics immediately.
She would spend the next five months in hospital, battling to survive and undergoing amputations of both legs and extensive surgery to her hands and nose.
‘I have no doubt the doctors acted as quickly and effectively as they could and that they saved my life,’ she says.
Doctors were never able to determine the source of the infection that triggered her sepsis, though one blood test revealed the presence of the pneumonia bug, streptococcus pneumoniae.
‘But I was very fit and healthy,’ says Liz. ‘I didn’t even have a cold in the week before it happened.’
Life for Liz and her family will never be as it was. As well as losing her legs and needing to have her damaged nose rebuilt using cartilage from her ribs, Liz has lost much of the use of her hands.
As her work involves copying by hand ancient graffiti written on the walls of temples in Egypt, she says: ‘I have to think about how I’m going to productively work in Egypt any more. That side of things has gone. It’s heartbreaking.’
But she and her husband are ‘determined to make the most of our “new normal”, to get on with things and live our lives in the way we want to’.
In September 2016, a little over a year after becoming ill, Liz returned to work lecturing and working on two books and papers. ‘That’s miraculous,’ she says.
‘I’m so fortunate I have a job that I can return to and that people have worked so hard to make that happen.’
In the next couple of weeks, thanks to a new pair of waterproof prosthetic legs, she plans to start teaching her son Emeran, two-and-a-half, to swim.
‘I’m very excited about that,’ she says. ‘We used to swim together as a family and I’ve been desperate to get back into the pool with him.’
But as determined as she is to look positively to the future, she says: ‘I can’t help wondering whether we might have been able to prevent all of this if we’d only been more aware about sepsis.’