END THE SEPSIS SCANDAL: From brain
damage to amputations...how the deadly condition can scar YOU for life
Jem Abbotts was a healthy 37-year-old father of two when he
decided to have a vasectomy, a routine procedure tens of thousands of men
undergo successfully every year.
Within ten days he would be dead, killed by sepsis, a deadly
condition that, if spotted in time, is easy to treat. The sales executive from
Sutton Coldfield underwent his vasectomy at the Sir Robert Peel Hospital in
Tamworth, Staffordshire. It went well, but at some point Jem developed an
infection.
Six days later, his wife Karen recalls that Jem came home
saying he felt ‘really ill, like he had flu, so I told him to go to bed and
rest’.
It wasn’t flu. Jem was feeling the effects of sepsis. This
fast-moving condition occurs when the body’s immune system over-reacts to an
infection, caused by anything from a cut finger to the flu, attacking not only
invading bugs but also its own tissues and organs, shutting them down one by
one
That Thursday night Jem was sick several times. The next day
‘he still felt rotten’, so Karen called the GP, who visited that afternoon.
Despite the vomiting and flu-like symptoms, the GP put Jem’s condition down
solely to an infection from the surgery.
He prescribed antibiotics but didn’t consider the much more
serious possibility of sepsis.
When he woke on Friday Jem complained of feeling cold and
had developed strange mottling down one side. Both symptoms, caused by low
blood pressure, were two telltale signs of sepsis. But it was Saturday before
he finally gave in to his family’s pleas to go to hospital.
It was already too late. Jem had started to become disorientated and by the time the
ambulance arrived ‘he was in almost a drunk-like state’, recalls Karen, 45. It
was the last time Karen would see her husband awake.
At the hospital his heart stopped; they got it working again
in intensive care but he never regained consciousness.
The last sight his children Emily, then 11, and Tom, eight,
had of their father was of him attached to a life-support machine, which was
finally switched off three days later.
Just before he died, Karen was told Jem had fallen victim to
sepsis. ‘I didn’t even know what it was,’ she says now. An inquest in March 2005 concluded no one had been to blame
for Jem’s death
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