‘I had a mild UTI, then started vomiting. In hours I was fighting deadly sepsis. This is what you must know about the symptoms… knowing them could save your life’

We were winding our way down the Twin Coast Discovery Highway – a scenic loop road in New Zealand which runs from Auckland to the far northern reaches of the country – when the painkillers finally wore off.

Like a dam breaking, a creeping agony began to rush in, everywhere and all-consuming.

My brain felt as though it was pressing against the inside of my skull. My chest was tight as I bent over my knees and tried not to throw up. Every muscle and bone in my body seemed to be screaming.

Each time I tried to speak, the only noises that came out were strange, low sobs and groans. We were still half an hour away from the nearest hospital – and I felt like I was going to die.

This was not how I had pictured my Easter weekend with my ­boyfriend’s family in New Zealand playing out.

Yet what started with a mild urinary tract infection (UTI) ended up putting me in hospital for four days and left me with months of physical and psychological repercussions.

I saw the diagnosis on my medical chart when I was finally discharged: Sepsis.

I didn’t know what it meant at the time, but I now know that I have survived a life-threatening condition that kills 48,000 people in the UK each year. That’s more than breast, bowel and prostate ­cancers combined.

That pain, that ‘I feel like I am going to die’ sensation – a known symptom of sepsis – is what it felt like when my immune system’s response to infection spiralled out of control and it began to attack my organs.

Plummeting blood pressure is only the first in a series of unpleasant side-effects. If you’re unlucky and don’t get the right treatment in time, it can cause shock, organ failure and eventually death.

Sepsis can be triggered by any infection, from a simple cut on the finger through to meningitis. Up to 30 per cent of cases start with a UTI.

My UTI started the Wednesday before Easter, 2024, and it was mild so I didn’t even go to the pharmacy.

But by the time we arrived at the beach in remote northern New Zealand, four hours north of Auckland, on Friday afternoon, my lower back had begun to ache, and the right side of my abdomen began to feel as though it was being stabbed.

Conscious of the fact that I was the girlfriend at the family event – and not wanting to make a fuss – I told myself it was nothing. By Friday evening, I was starting to feel achy all over.

At 7am on Saturday, I woke up and ran to the bathroom to vomit. My boyfriend checked on me as he got up to go fishing with the boys. He asked if he should stay but I waved him off. ‘Don’t be silly. It’s a 24-hour bug.’

But by Saturday night, despite taking painkillers to get myself through the annual Taupo Bay Easter fishing competition, I couldn’t walk due to the pain in my back and abdomen. Miserable and shaking, I crawled to bed.

I woke throughout the night in alternating sweats and shivers.

On Sunday morning, I told my boyfriend I needed to see a doctor. The stabbing pain in my side seemed to radiate out, and my lower back and legs felt as though the muscle had been tenderised. We agreed that if I still felt bad the next day, we would book an appointment.

I woke up on Monday morning with every symptom intensified, so we booked an appointment at the nearest hospital in Kawakawa; an hour’s drive away. The first doctor I saw thought it could be appendicitis. This sort of misdiagnosis is not unusual, as Dr Ron Daniels, an NHS consultant in intensive care and founder and Chief Medical Officer of the UK Sepsis Trust, later told me.

‘Sepsis can arise as a consequence of infection anywhere in the body, so it’s almost as if no two people with sepsis look the same,’ he explains.

At this rural New Zealand ­hospital my misdiagnosis with appendicitis is likely to have saved my life.

The hospital was too small to have an operating theatre, so I was sent to another hospital an hour away. It was there that they realised I was not suffering from appendicitis – and treated me for sepsis.

The memory of that car journey is blurry, but I remember being scared: I was 23, on the other side of the world from my family, swimming through a painful fog with every movement.

When we arrived my boyfriend went to talk to the front desk nurse and turned to find me curled up in a ball on the waiting room floor with my head pressed to the linoleum.

I remember being wheeled through the ICU as I vomited into a bowl, then being on a bed with the nurse struggling to get a drip into my arm. I was shaking so badly that two people had to hold me down to do it.

The doctors around me were murmuring quietly. ‘Appendicitis?’ ‘Sepsis?’ ‘Peritonitis?’

They treated me with what Dr Daniels told me were the correct medical steps (known as the sepsis six) in those first few hours, including intravenous antibiotics and monitoring my vital signs, particularly blood pressure.

Thankfully, the immediate care I received in the ICU saved my life. This, tragically, is not the same for everyone.

Sepsis is so fast-moving that every minute matters.

As Dr Daniels put it: ‘Every hour’s delay in getting the right treatment can make a difference to the chance of survival, somewhere between about 1 and 2 per cent an hour.’

He emphasises that the most important thing in diagnosis is in empowering those affected and their family to speak up: ‘There’s no single diagnostic blood test we can do. So to get this right we need a public who are empowered to ask the question “Could it be sepsis?”‘

Later in the evening, once my condition was more stable, I was moved to a ward.

The next four days were a haze of a fever which didn’t break for two days – despite the fluids and IV antibiotics – and consequently what felt like endless tests and scans: Bloods, urine, MRI, CT and ultrasound.

On the fifth day I was discharged. The doctors tentatively confirmed that they thought I had sepsis from a kidney infection, but, as Dr Daniels tells me, the source of the infection ­causing sepsis can be hard to identify – yet another roadblock for emergency doctors in treating sepsis effectively.

I could walk, but, too exhausted and weak to get far, I left hospital the same way I came in: In a wheelchair.

I’d gone to New Zealand to meet friends on a kumara (sweet potato) farm in the north-­western reaches but despite my best efforts to stay upbeat, my ­recovery was slow and it was an incredibly lonely four weeks before I was able to join everyone out in the fields.

I was exhausted all the time and found it difficult to get out of bed each morning, often having to sleep again in the afternoon. It was as though a weight settled on my chest in those first few days after being discharged and did not truly lift for months.

This is not uncommon: Post-sepsis syndrome (PSS) – fatigue, anxiety and memory issues – affects up to 40 per cent of survivors and can last anywhere from a few weeks to the rest of a patient’s life.

As Dr Daniels explains: ‘Sepsis causes inflammation across all of the tissues in the body, with the death of cells occurring as a result. It’s thought this cell death contributes to the complexity and range of symptoms in PSS.’

Now, almost two years on, my physical and mental health have recovered and most of my friends don’t know it ever happened.

It’s only when I see stories in the media where people die from sepsis, that I am brought back to that moment, in the Whangarei hospital waiting room, forehead pressed to the floor, terrified that I was going to die.

Dr Daniels explained that feeling for me. He said: ‘This sense of impending doom is frequently described by survivors – when we consider the actions of a pet dog or cat when it is sick, they might take themselves off to die… it appears that instinct is not restricted to animals.’

In other words, it seems to come from the deepest-rooted kind of instinct, that your organs and your body are shutting down.

Hanging up the phone with Dr Daniels, I sat in silence for a moment or two before bursting into tears.

Filled with a rushing sense of gratitude for both his work and the doctors in New Zealand who knew how to spot the signs, it finally sank in – nearly two years on – that without them, one of those tragic news stories might well have been me.

sepsistrust.org