Denise Devoto, 52, was told she had a chest infection before she was taken to hospital where she was diagnosed with sepsis and nearly died at the Hallamshire Hospital
A woman who believed she had a chesty cough narrowly avoided death as she was later diagnosed as having sepsis.
Denise Devoto, 52, woke up in the middle of the night in December 2022 with a sharp pain in the right-hand side of her ribcage, and in her lungs. A week later she went to a walk-in centre who sent her to the Northern General Hospital in Sheffield and gave her a prescription for Tamiflu. Her condition worsened overnight and her GP prescribed antibiotics.
The same afternoon she felt breathless as her skin turned grey and her lips a shade of blue. Her husband, Mark, called an ambulance and she was rushed to the Infectious Diseases Unit at the Hallamshire Hospital.
Finally, she was told she had pneumonia which had progressed to sepsis – a life-threatening condition caused when the body’s immune system overreacts to an infection and damages organs and tissues.
Denise said of the horror experience: “Quite often people describe the feeling of feeling like they’re going to die when they start with sepsis. It did truly feel like that’s what was going to happen.
“During the first 24 hours in hospital, I had eight different doctors looking after me and they said I was the most poorly patient on the ward at the time. Even though I was really quite poorly myself, part of what was traumatic was the really poorly people around me. Especially when those poor people went into cardiac arrest, and I was aware of what was happening around me.”
During her ordeal, Denise also had hallucinations of loved ones who had passed away. She added: “[I had] my mum, my dad and my brother sat around my bed talking to me, which really freaked me out because they’ve all been dead a long time. I was really quite traumatised, and I was hearing all sorts of different voices, and music playing that wasn’t playing. The doctors advised it could be the medication they had put me on or the infection, or maybe even a combination of both that were causing my hallucinations.”
Denise spent the last five days of her hospital stay on the thoracic ward, before being discharged on 24th January 2023 after five weeks in hospital. Denise found the UK Sepsis Trust’s Facebook support group through a friend who also had sepsis. She has now encouraged others to make themselves aware of the danger.
She added: “Make yourself aware of the symptoms of sepsis, but also be aware that just because they’re the symptoms that are listed, there might be other things as well that might cause you to have concerns. Never be afraid to challenge anyone in the medical profession.
“If you’ve got a gut feeling something really isn’t right, then challenge them. Because with hindsight, what I should have done when I was in A&E on the Sunday evening, is said, ‘I’m too poorly, I really feel this is more than just flu.’”
