Long road to recovery after sepsis ordeal for Wolverhampton woman, but also a desire to help others avoid same illness
A woman who underwent a quadruple amputation after being taken ill with sepsis has spoken about her long road to recovery, her aim to walk again and her hopes of helping people to avoid going through the ordeal she went to.
Manjit Sangha's life changed in July last year when she returned to her home in Penn in Wolverhampton on a Sunday afternoon in July last year, feeling unwell and by the following morning, she was unconscious.
After being taken to hospital, her heart stopped six times while in intensive care at New Cross Hospital in Wolverhampton, before surgeons at Russells Hall Hospital in Dudley later had to amputate both of her legs below the knee, as well as both of her hands, due to the spread of sepsis.
She spent 32 weeks in hospital and has only recently been able to go home, with a bed set up in her living room and two wheelchairs, but with work needing to be done to make the house more disability accessible.
Her husband Kam described finding her with ice-cold hands and feet, purple lips and struggling to breathe and said it had been a shock to see how quickly things had escalated and how they hadn't known enough about sepsis at that point.
He said: "We didn't expect that you could get sepsis from a little cut and it could go that far, because Manjit had said she thought she had a cold when she came from work, but overnight and in the morning, I found her unconscious.
"Both her hands and feet were ice-cold, as were her lips and nose, but the rest of her body was warm and, at the time, we didn't know what the symptoms were for sepsis and what to look for and even when she came in from work, we didn't know what it was and just presumed it was a cold and carried on as normal.
"She took a couple of paracetamol and went to bed and I was downstairs and went to work on the night shift, so I can't imagine what she went through that night, but in the morning, I went to sleep and, two hours later, I got up by coincidence to ask if she'd phoned the doctors and that's when I found her on the sofa."
Manjit said she was still struggling to believe what had happened and also said she wasn't getting the professional support she required to help her at home.
