A small cut while clipping my nails almost killed me
A dad has shared how close he came to death after a simple scratch while cutting his nails lead to him battling sepsis in intensive care.
When he nicked his hand in June 2022, Tatton Spiller, 43, a politics writer from Whitstable, Kent, wasn't initially concerned as it was only small cut, but the following day it became swollen and sore, so much so that it was too tender to wear his watch over it.
Later that day he also started feeling unwell and the next day when he still wasn't feeling better he decided to take himself to the Minor Injuries Clinic where he was seen by a nurse. There, he was told to keep the wound clean, take paracetamol and come back if it got any worse.
While Tatton says he mentioned sepsis, medical staff didn't seem worried, but by the afternoon he started being sick. He took to his bed and says he didn't get up for a while.
Tatton's fiancée, Katie, wasn't home at the time, but was texting to check up on her partner, but he says his messages and voicenotes were becoming less coherent so Katie texted her mum to go over and check on him. It was only after his mother-in-law insisted he go straight back to the minor injuries clinic that Tatton’s symptoms were identified as sepsis, and he was rushed to A&E.
“My mother-in-law found me in a right state in bed," he explains. "I was dying. If she hadn’t come round, I can’t bear to think what would have happened. Going back to an empty house where there was no one to spot it and wouldn’t have been anyone for 72 hours afterwards - that could have been it for me. I went back to where I had been sent away 24 hours ago and they took one look at me and called 999."
Once the ambulance arrived, Tatton says he was taken straight to intensive care, where his memory became hazy and the hallucinations begun. He says the infection convinced him it was 1966, he was in a cinema, and that a tiger was in his hospital room. "I was hallucinating, I didn’t know where I was. I had no relation to reality at all."
Tatton ended up spending five days in the ICU, but says he struggles to remember his time there due to the hallucinations he was experiencing. It was only when Katie, who he has been with for six years, could finally visit that he says he "snapped out" of the haze and was moved to a recovery ward.
Two years on from his ordeal, Tatton has made a full recovery physically, but still struggles with the mental scars from the traumatic event. Initially he was unable to cut his nails in the first few months after going home, asking his fiancée to do it for him, but he says he has now moved past this.
"Although I was pretty unlucky to get it, having survived it means I am a very lucky man. I have recovered physically, but mentally I experience bad flashbacks about the time I was in the intensive care unit. I remember some of those visions very clearly and they are not good. Anything can set me off and it is hard because suddenly you are back dying in hospital again."
Now Tatton is fighting for more awareness for the condition, encouraging others to get their cuts examined - no matter how small as spotting the signs of sepsis early could help to save lives. "The word sepsis is much more in people’s vocabulary now than it was," he explains. "It takes such a small infection that can then have these huge consequences. Getting people to ask, ‘could this be sepsis?’ and get it checked out is so important."
As Tatton points out: "It is not just the risk of dying, but having your hands and feet amputated, being in a coma, your loved ones being told you might die. All of it is preventable if we could get people to question whether they have sepsis.”
For more information and support with sepsis, visit Sepsis Research FEAT at https://sepsisresearch.org.uk/
Additional reporting SWNS.
Read more about sepsis:
Mum who lost all limbs in sepsis warning as killer infection strikes on holiday (Daily Record, 6-min read)
Woman raising awareness of sepsis after what she presumed was a cold led to the condition (Yahoo Life UK, 5-min read)
Study reveals which people are most likely to die from sepsis (PA Media, 5-min read)
