I Lost My Legs & Hand... After Getting A Cough

After an incredible battle for life Jayne Carpenter, 49, explains why she’s one of the lucky ones....

- Jane Common & Louise Baty

Walking through the soft sand as waves lapped at our feet, I reached for my husband Robert’s hand. It was April 2016 and we’d come to our favourite beach in the Gower, an hour’s drive from our home in Merthyr Tydfil, South Wales.

‘I always feel happy by the sea,’ I smiled to Robert, 52, drinking in the incredible view.

We both worked long hours – me as an orthopaedic nurse and Robert as a plasterer. Since getting married 18 years earlier, in 1998, we’d spent our weekends out walking. We loved being in the fresh air.

But within days of our trip to the beach, I developed an awful cough and I had to ring in sick to work. I tried to rest but started coughing up disgusting brown phlegm. The following morning, I felt so breathless, Robert drove me to the out-of-hours GP at Prince Charles Hospital in Merthyr Tydfil. A chest X-ray confirmed I had pneumonia.

‘The air isn’t getting into your left lung at all,’ the doctor explained.

Clinging on to life

I was admitted to a ward and given an oxygen mask to help me breathe. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ I whispered to Robert, seeing his anxious face.

But within hours, tests showed my infection levels had risen. As my condition deteriorated, I fell unconscious. I left Robert and my parents to cope with the horror of what unfolded…

Tests showed I’d developed sepsis – a potentially fatal complication that occurs when chemicals that are released into the bloodstream to fight off an infection, like a cough or a cold, then trigger inflammatory responses throughout the body.