Sepsis In Very Young Children - Cy and Aimee's stories.

Episode 2 • 5th September 2022 • Words Of Sepsis • Sepsis Research FEAT

Abi Dawson

Hi, I'm Abi. And I'd like to extend a very warm welcome to these Sepsis Research FEAT, Words Of Sepsis podcasts. Over the course of eight episodes, we'll be talking to sepsis survivors and their families about their experiences of sepsis. Some of the stories you hear may be quite painful, many are uplifting. They are stories of shock, fear, sometimes loss, often courage, but also of hope.

Sepsis is a condition that still takes the lives of some 50,000 people in the UK every year. That's about five lives lost every hour. Our hope is that through these podcasts, many more people will become aware of sepsis and that some of the loss and suffering related to sepsis can be prevented as you increase your knowledge and the knowledge of others.

So do please listen, share these words of sepsis and help to raise awareness and save lives.

Abi Dawson

In this episode, you'll be hearing from Cy and Aimee, whose infant children came close to losing their lives to sepsis. Cy's story is quite hard to listen to, but it's also really important to hear. His experience of sepsis was through his baby son, Oliver.

I've often described it as I was like one person. My son was born and then I became someone else entirely. As soon as I saw him, it was all over. It was definitely a game changer. I think I kind of grew up instantly, almost. The things I used to worry about just seemed insignificant. The first time I held him, my wife was getting seen to, I held Oliver and I just looked at him, the nurse asked for him back after 45 minutes, it felt like I was abducted by aliens and had lost time. I was always worried about him immediately. Iam self employed and selectively took two weeks off. After the first week, my wife was like, I think you should go back because you keep checking him every 30 seconds.

Abi Dawson

Oliver was just five weeks old when he began to get poorly. Cy tells us that at first there was nothing they could really put their finger on.

He wasn't very well and a bit run down, just not himself, so decided to take him to our walk in centre. The doctor had a look at him and said, I think he's got a viral thing. Sounds like a bit of a cold, he's a little bit warm. He gave him a nasal spray and we thought he'll be fine. This time I'm not going to freak out, I'm going to just do as I'm told and everything like that. Everything kind of went normal, I put Oliver into bed, and then from about one o'clock onwards in the morning, he was very unsettled, almost like moaning, he was only five weeks old, so you're kind of getting used to new noises at bedtime and everything like that. But he was clearly distressed. It got to about 2.30am, I said to my wife I'll just get up with him. I got up to him and he wouldn't let me put him down to change his nappy, wouldn't let me move him to give him his nasal spray. He just wanted to be on me.Anytime I moved him, he moaned. His arms were hanging down by his sides. I thought, okay, he's just got this cold and that's what I've been told, he'll be fine, don't freak out. So we just stayed downstairs watching the TV. It got to about six thirty AM in the morning, I took him to my wife and told her he's not right. He's not eating, he's moaning and not letting me change him. I gave him to her and took him off my chest, as I did it was the first time I had a proper look at him. My wife said I'm not happy with his breathing. He's breathing a little bit funny. As I looked, he was almost doing short, sharp chest breaths. She said I'm going to phone one one one. At that point, I started freaking out a little bit. What do you mean? Everything's fine? I remember my wife relaying questions to me that she was getting asked on the phone and saying, how long has this gone on for? I immediately started to feel guilty because it was something worth phoning one one one for, especially when I'd been up with him for hours, why didn't I make the call earlier. I almost kind of started being quite abrupt with my wife. I said, I don't know, I don't know. Do you know what I mean? Which I later apologised for because it was spiraling at the time. The call agent said we'll send the paramedics out. It was about eight that morning when an ambulance pulled up outside our house for a five week old. I was like, what is going on here? Try to keep calm. The paramedics checked him over and said, everything looks okay. The one paramedic took his heart rate and handed a note to the other paramedic. I said what's that? she told me Oliver's heart rate is a little bit high, so we think he might be fighting something. Right, okay, what does that mean I said?, well, we're not too sure. No cause for concern just yet. Then she said, look, we can either take him to the hospital now and you can come along with us or wait until the GP opens and you can go there, but I think their just going to say the same thing we've told you,that he's got a little viral or something and he's fighting something and he's going to be fine. I could see that my wife Christina was contemplating it, and I thought, don't say you want to go to the hospital. I'm the one who's paranoid here. He's just got a cold. We don't need to take him to the hospital for a cold. Christina said, no, I think I want to take him to the hospital. I thought my goodness, we're going to look like the most overreacting parents ever. I said ok I'll take Summer, our daughter, to school, you take Oliver to hospital, and then I'll come and pick you up whenever. So I was walking Summer to school, and she said, do you think Oliver is going to be okay? And I said, yeah, he's got a cold, babe. They'll look at him and they'll send him home. The school is literally at the top of our road. It's about a minute walk from our front door. On the way back Christina called me saying, you need to get here now. They've just rushed Oliver into another room. I don't really remember them getting in the car or anything like that. I just remember going to the reception saying, Where's my son Oliver Gregory? And she said, he was just in this room here, as I turned the corner, there he was, on this big adult hospital bed with all these tubes and being monitored. I just immediately sat next to him and held his hand and thought, what's going on? Christina said, they think he's fighting an infection, quite a serious infection. I remember having this underlying feeling of almost like anger and I was afraid. I was definitely afraid. I know that sounds really strange to say, I was obviously very emotional, but I just couldn't believe that this was happening. It was that whole fear and then that inward sort of anger. I remember a nurse came over and he checked Oliver's screen, checked the bag, the fluid and everything like that, he made a comment, like, oh, bless him and stroked his hair. I said to Christina, who's that? she said, his name is Allyi, who I get quite emotional talking about. She said, he's the one who kind of took him off me. I asked what she meant and she said that he had taken Oliver from Christina to have a look at him and then he put him on a table. Christina was kind of relaying the story. He examined him and then all of a sudden whisked him off, and put him on the necessary drips. The IV, the antibiotics and everything like that. He felt his soft spot and everything and knew that it was sunken and he was dehydrated. They decided they were going to move him onto the children's ward. I thought he's not coming home as he's got a bed. I remembered we were pushing the big hospital bed through the hallways of the hospital with the nurse Ally, my wife on one side and me on the other side of the bed. I just remember women in particular, maybe mums and nans, kept looking at him and I just thought, don't look at my kid that way, because he's going to be fine. Do you know what I mean? The moment the reality starts setting in is when the adrenaline starts calming down a little bit and you start realising, this is serious. People are kind of like he shouldn't be here, this is unfathomable. We went onto the children's ward. We got our own room away from the main ward because they thought what he might have, might be contagious or whatever, He had a little baby sort of bed then. I remember him sleeping a lot for the first day or two because he had all these tubes and monitors and everything like that. A lot of the stay, especially the early first couple of days, kind of blend for me. I can't remember when it was specifically. The main doctor kind of came in and said, he's got a form of sepsis. He's got meningococcal septicemia. I just remember my wife was holding him at the time, and she looked at me and she started to cry. She said, we could have lost him. I just kind of stood there. I think I talked about it in the blog with my mouth open, I felt stupid almost because I couldn't believe this it was happening and didnt know what to say. I remember holding onto the rails of the bed because I thought my legs might go here. We caught it early and he's going to be okay, we want to keep him here to observe him and do some further tests. That was the first point that they mentioned, that they might do a lumbar puncture to make sure he didn't have meningitis, to see that it didn't go to his brain.

Abi Dawson

Cy found the lumbar puncture understandably upsetting. He explains how he was in the room when it happened.

It was on the Sunday I was feeding Oliver, and the nurse came in and said, we're going to do the lumbar puncture. I said, when? And she said, now. It needs to be now. We've got enough people on the ward now. She said, you might want to stop feeding him because he might vomit. I remember when she said vomit, it's such a violent sort of word. I thought, what do you mean? So my wife wasn't there. She was at home sterilising the bottles. I thought, I'm not going to tell her because she'll race back here. There's nothing she can do anyway. So I carried him in. They said, ok, dad, do you want to go and take a walk or walk outside?I said, no, I'm not going to do that. The nurse brought another doctor in to try and tell me you have to leave. We don't let parents stay in for this. I said, Please don't make me leave this room. I'm not going to get involved. I'm not going to come out. I'm just going to stand here, I need to be in here. I can't leave him. He's five weeks old. I have to be in here with him. They knew that it was no good. I thought, Please don't call security on me because I don't want to make a scene. So anyway, they started, and I faced away whilst talking to him. The doctors said, yes, talk to him dad, talk to him as I could hear him crying immediately. I heard the main nurse say stop, stop stop stop! I thought what's going on? One nurse had never done it before, and in hindsight, it must have been horrendous. It was horrendous for me. She couldn't do it. She just couldn't do it. I remember seeing her at the side with her head in her hands, and I thought, what is going on here? Then the nurse said, well, we need to do this, we need to do that. I almost just went into drill sergeant mode and said, just tell me what needs to be done, and I'll do it. The nurse said he needs to be folded, once you fold him, once you open up that vertebrae, I have my hand, my left hand on the back of his nappy and my right hand on the back of his head. She said, you have to bend him and once he's bent and that needles inside, you cannot let him go. I said, Just do it. I was not dad then. I was not emotional. I was terminator, you know, so they did it. I was kissing his cheek and everything comforting while they were doing it. I remember seeing his spinal fluid come out into that syringe, because I was looking, I was kissing him, saying, It's all going to be okay as he was screaming. I kept thinking, his throat, his throat, because he was going so red. His hair was wet. He was crying. I was trying to kiss him, trying to calm him down and I remember at that particular moment thinking something in me kind of broke, something was never really going to be the same, because I was like, I shouldn't really be seeing my son's spinal fluid leave his body. Then they took the needle out, and she was okay. So I said can I pick him up? Can I pick him up? I thought his back, his back am I allowed to touch him. He said, yeah, you can pick him up,just don't put your hand where he's been injected and she put a plaster on it. That's when all the emotions kind of hit me, that's when I was dad again and just a 29 year old boy. Life doesn't really prepare you for this stuff. And I said, is he okay? Is it okay? And she said, Well, I can't say anything yet, but the spinal fluid is clear, which is a good sign. That changed something in me then. Fast forward a little bit, there was a little bit of confusion, but he ended up being diagnosed - no meningitis, his body had cleared the septicemia and he was going to be fine and we could go home. But then that guilt and that feeling of, if I would have got him in sooner, maybe he wouldn't have had to have a lumbar puncture or maybe they could have treated it quicker, whatever and that fear of this is a silent non symptomatic, for the most part, especially at that age and at that very time, killer and critical thing.

Abi Dawson

Cy explained that that sense of guilt was hard to get rid of.

It started to get worse, the older he got, which was weird. I didn't get over it. I just started to get worse. I don't have a fantastic relationship with my own dad, I have a great relationship with my mum. So I always wanted to be a great dad. But yeah, I thought I need to be Superman. Anything that they face, I need to take care of it. I think a lot of that came into play in the lumbar puncture. So there's no way, it's going to take an army to get me out of this room, guys. I'm not leaving him. But, yeah, there was a tonne of pressure. As he started to get older, because I didn't recognise symptoms and stuff like that. Even now, if you go through the symptoms, it's quite similar to other stuff, and especially at that age when they can't talk and they can't say, what's wrong? As he started getting closer and closer to eighteen months and twenty months and then two, he was more energetic and stuff like that, something started happening to me where I couldn't sleep. I was having really bad anxiety at night and having completely irrational fears and stuff like that. I remember always having this feeling if I wanted to sleep on his bedroom floor because I wanted to be near him all the time, if anything, I would never miss it again and that kind of led me to a point where my wife and my mum said, you need to go and talk to someone professionally, you need to go to therapy, because this is not conducive to good mental health, right? Because I was like, I'm fine. A lot of me didn't want to get better because I felt like I deserved to feel that way. I felt like that was why I missed it. So I deserve to feel guilty, I deserve to feel afraid and I'll never miss it again, and that pressure and that punishment, I think I felt at that point that I deserved to kind of carry around with me. I ended up self referring. I've got a wonderful therapist who diagnosed me with PTSD. The PTSD was more to do with the lumbar puncture, I thought. PTSD belonged to people who have been to war and seen really, truly horrific things. The best way she explained it to me was she was, imagine you're trying to get your clean towels and you want to put them away in the airing cupboard and you just scrunch them up and you throw them in and the door doesn't shut properly. So now every time you open the airing cupboard, the towels fall out. She said, that's how you've processed that experience. You haven't folded it neatly and put it away. So that's something that we worked on. The very first thing I said to her, first thing, I need you to know I don't want to be here. I think I deserve to feel this way. I don't want to get better. I'm here because my mum and my wife have kind of told me to be here. It got to the point at the end of the session, I didn't want to leave. But, yeah, I did work through that. She was incredible. She was wonderful. That was really life changing for me. And then, like I said, a lot of it came down to anxiety and that fear of if I don't watch him twenty four seven, I will miss something and he will die. I did go through a stage of saying the worst thing or it could have been worse. And she said, what do you mean? I said, I'm worried he'll die. She said, you need to say that and own it, because that's really what you're afraid of. You're worried if you're not looking at him all the time, something will happen and he will die. That was what Sepsis then became to me. It was the big invisible baddie. Do you know what I mean? If I don't watch out for it, it will take my son. I want to make sure I say this because I want to make sure that he's kind of recognised. Me and my wife were talking about having another child, and I said, no, I can't have another baby because there's two little communication. I don't know them well enough to know that there might be something wrong. So I just can't, I'll never be able to have another child. But we had a conversation. I said, I really want one. I want another one, but I'm too scared. So that was a huge point in going to the therapy. I think I was in therapy for about six weeks before my wife fell pregnant. It was almost like it kind of just all happened and I talked with my therapist through the whole thing. I talked about this nurse Allyi, and I said, if he (Oliver) hadn't been put in front of Nurse Ally, I don't know what would have happened, because a couple of doctors saw him and said, we think it's a viral thing. Whereas Nurse Ally looked at him and said no, this is something serious. I needed my Oliver to be in front of Nurse Ally on that day at that time, and it just happened that way. My wife fell pregnant. I said, we've got our first scan in a couple of weeks, but my therapist goes, do you think you'll take Oliver to the hospital? And that anxiety came back immediately. I literally went, Never. He will never go to the hospital again. Not that there was anything wrong with the hospital. It was just I had that fear of if I take him in, someone will say, can I have a look at him? And I won't get him back. He won't leave with me. That was where I was still at, so it took me a while, but yeah, then we went for our first scan, and my wife then had to wait for blood tests. I said, I'm just going to go for a walk. I thought, I'm just going to see if I can find this nurse Ally, right? So I'm walking, and I've asked a couple of people, and the second woman I asked, she said, oh, no, I don't know anyone on A and E. She said, but it's just down there if you want to go and ask. And I went to A and E, the same doors that we've come out of. And I was like, oh, my God, these are the doors. We came out. A lady had come out, and I said, is there a nurse Ally who works on A and E? She said, no, there was an Ally, but he left. Maybe if you want to write him a letter? Okay. So I was walking back, and I bumped into the second woman again. She said, oh, did you find Ally? And I said, no, he used to work on A and E, but he doesn't work there anymore. She went, oh he?, when you said Ally, I thought you meant a woman. She said, I work with an Ally in oncology, he used to work on A& E. Do you want me to see if it's him. And I was like, ok. She went in, and my heart rate just shot up and then he walked through the door. I got to say thank you to him and I told him, you saved my son's life. I said, we were in the middle of a pandemic, so I said I know we're not supposed to but I have sanitised, can I shake your hand? I said, because he had to be put in front of you. You took action on it. And I said, you saved my boy. And I was like he said, someone was passing by, and he said, can you just stop? And he said, can you just listen to this? Because it was obviously a colleague of his. And the guy said Ally, that's fantastic. And he said to me, he said, babies are resilient. He said, if you know the signs for sepsis, you know what to look out for. You get them on the antibiotics, you get them on the IV and everything like that. They'll be okay. They'll make a recovery. And I said, I know. I said, but I can't let you underplay, downplay what you did. He said, what are you doing here? And I said, We've had another scan, got another baby on the way. And he said it was fantastic. And, yeah, funny enough, we actually bumped into him a couple of months later when Oliver had croup, ended up back at the hospital, and Ally got to see Oliver again. So that was huge for me. That was all kind of like I went to therapy, my wife fell pregnant. I got to thank Ally. We then did Sepsis Awareness Month and everything , it was a huge kind of turning point there.

Abi Dawson

Oliver now has a new baby brother, and the whole family is doing well. Cy says he will always help to raise awareness of Sepsis whenever he is able to.

Grayson, my baby's only nearly five months old. I don't typically worry about him as much as Oliver. I would say that I'm not irrational, but I still do carry around that fear to an extent. I have to kind of keep it but I understand how to use it. So he had a viral sort of thing just going back a couple of months ago now, and he was quite run down. He was sleeping a lot, just very not like him. He was warm. He was sick. He had an upset stomach. He wasn't eating. I took him to A an E, and they checked his obs and stuff like that, and they said, okay, we think he might have a little viral thing. I went in to go and see the nurse, have a little look over and I went, you need to check him for sepsis, and she went, I don't think he's got sepsis and she didn't laugh like I am now. She's like, I don't think he has, there's no obvious sort of signs of it. So do you see on this little amber list here? Because there's like a poster right where it's like amber and then red symptoms. So this amber list here, he's got three of these. And I said, the last time I took him to an A&E, I was told that he had a cold and then 24r hours later, he was on a drip. I said, I need you to check him. She kind of looked at me like, you've been through something. I'll check him. So she didn't shoot me down or anything like that. She didn't make me feel silly for it. She checked him. She was like, okay, there's no clear obvious signs, take him back to the waiting room. We'll get another doctor to see you. And I kid you not, I put him down on the floor when he got to the waiting room, and that boy started running around in between the chairs and stuff and all the older mums and stuff all just looked at me like, yeah, they'll do that, they do that. So I was like, okay, maybe it's not Sepsis, but I will never not ask now, I will never not push that.

Abi Dawson

Aimee is a mum of eight, so she's seen more than her fair share of childhood illnesses. And at first, when her youngest child, Corey, began to feel unwell, she wasn't too worried. But that quickly changed.

Aimee

We'd just moved house, we moved from Northern Ireland back to Edinburgh on the 14th December. So I haven't finished Christmas, I haven't finished unpacking. We've got the dog as well. So eight kids, a husband, a dog, utter chaos. The kids actually went to stay with my mother in law on Christmas Eve so that we could go and finish, not Christmas Eve, sorry, the day before christmas eve, so we could finish our Christmas shopping. Then Christmas morning was our standard chaos. Wrapping paper everywhere, boxes everywhere, table full of food, house full of alcohol. On Christmas Day, Corey was quiet, well, more quiet than usual, but we put it down to just being overwhelmed. It was his first kind of Christmas, thinking, oh my goodness, is this my family? But Boxing Day woke up and his temperature was sky high. He wasn't himself, he didn't want to drink, he didn't want to eat, he had awful diarrhoea. After his first dose of Calpol, his temperature did come down just a little and I've got the seven other kids. I don't panic too much when it comes to illnesses. I've done my usual, I gave my calpol, I gave him ibuprofen. I did try to phone 111 on Boxing Day and I couldn't get through, but I wasn't concerned at this stage, it was more we didn't have a gp yet, with us just moving, then the next day probably just something wasn't right.

Abi Dawson

Aimee says it was something we hear all the time, a mother's instinct that made her go to hospital.

Aimee

Corey's a very boisterous, full on cheeky chap. Even now, when I'm fully recovered, you look at him and you think, wow. But that day, the day after boxing day, my heart told me. My husband was actually on the phone to One One One and I was in a shower quickly trying to wash my hair and just took him in, because at this stage his temperature was at 40 and was not coming down with anything, he hadn't eaten either and he still had the awful diarrhoea. I had the dread of going into a and e thinking I'm going to be here for hours. But when I went in and explained his symptoms, I didn't even get to sit down. We were straight in and he was triaged. They’d taken his blood sugar levels and they were really low. His heart rate was sky high, his blood pressure was really low and his temperature was still high. So we were sent straight through to a room and, you know, they had done all the usual observations on him and at first they suspected tonsillitis. His throat was really red and swollen. At that point I thought, this is great. Antibiotics if we go and we will go home. A doctor came in and said, no, we really want to run more blood tests. So those blood tests eventually came back and his white blood cells, red blood cells and iron levels were all extremely low, dangerously low. Then we were told we were going nowhere, we were being kept in and it was a day after that the doctor came in and said Corey's got sepsis. They'd already started IV antibiotics as well. It's really strange. I got there at the right time. His infectious disease doctor said if I'd gone on Boxing Day, I would have been sent home and Corey wouldn't have made it. The timing was just right. It was that day as well, though, that I had other doctors coming and talking about putting, at first, a central line through his arm because his veins were starting to go. And I was like, okay, that's fine. His lymph nodes in his neck started to go really swollen. This is when he started to constantly cry as well. He was still refusing to eat, he's still refusing to drink. You still had awful diarrhoea. And then that's when I felt, okay, something's yeah, this is bad.

Abi Dawson

And this wasn't the first time doctors had mentioned sepsis to her. When it comes to Corey.

Aimee

They actually suspected he had sepsis when he was born. So when he was born, he didn't cry, he just made grunting noises and the Paediatric doctor said that they would give him five hours, I think four or five hours, and they would start antibiotics. And they did. Thankfully back then all was okay. But again, it's something that you hear about, you hear it on the news, you see it on online articles, you never think it's going to be you. It was really surreal. Even now, when I think back, it feels like a bad dream because these white blood cells were so low. One of the doctors was concerned about leukaemia, so he had to have a bone marrow biopsy done, which thankfully came back ok. He also had a lumbar puncture done for meningitis as well. Even though I say I get on with things, and I did just get on with it, it got to a stage where I felt like, what's next? What more could possibly go wrong? You know, he was in intensive care for two weeks and it was up and down every day. Some days it was no progress, some days it was he's making a little bit of progress, and then another day would be we're really worried about him again. Then obviously we had the leukaemia bombshell. I didn't actually come home for two,three weeks. I stayed in the Ronald McDonald suite at the top of the hospital. I couldn't leave Corey. I knew the other children were safe and they were fine. I just couldn't leave his side.

Abi Dawson

Aimee says that it was a tough situation for her to deal with and she worried if she was to blame.

Aimee

Everything was running through my head, You know, what have I done wrong? How can I have seven other healthy children, but number eight is suffering so bad, I just wanted to trade places with him. He’s so little. Minutes before he had to go to surgery to be put in his coma, he was still crying, asking for a banana and then it was walking into the room and it was the silence, the room was still, no sound, and his body seemed to triple in size. I felt more concerned about the other kids. How are they going to cope? How am I going to cope if the worst happens so that I can still be the best mum for them? How is my husband going to cope? Horrible. So about twelve days into ICU, they changed his antibiotics and they gave him steroids as well and instantly after the steroids, all the swelling came down from all his lymph nodes and the antibiotics seemed to improve and his infection levels were finally coming down. That was when it was decided that they were going to take him off the muscle relaxant medicines and put him on liquid morphine and diazepam, which he loved. He used to get really excited and clap his hands when he saw the syringe coming. In fact, he actually left ICU with a syringe as a toy before going to another medical ward. It's so funny. That's when things really picked up. Then he stayed in a further two weeks to have his antibiotics through. They fitted a longer term central line in his chest. The one on his groin had failed and got infected as well. So the decision was made to put the better one on his chest. So he was receiving his antibiotics through that for the next two weeks. And then after that, I think it was about twelve weeks, we were going every week for blood tests to monitor his white blood cells. and thankfully he's been okay ever since. You genuinely would not think what has happened. He just had his second birthday yesterday. All of us are just standing,staring at him thinking, what a kid.

Abi Dawson

And Corey's doctors are now trying to find out why he developed sepsis.

Aimee

The doctors kept saying, we're more concerned about the fact that the other children are never sick. They've done a first lot of genetic tests and that's just searching for everything that could have caused this. We want to get to the bottom of why his red and white blood cells were so low. And then they've taken another lot of tests and specifically looking at neutropenia, which is for low white blood cells. Now that he is clear from Leukaemia too, the infectious disease doctor is also trying to figure out why it was the steroids, because basically, once he got the steroids, that was when things massively improved. He goes every three months now for checkups, so they want to keep continuing that for a year and fingers crossed the testing comes back soon as well. So we had Streptococcus pneumonia and hemorrhagic influenza. I think it's Streptococcus pneumonia he’ss actually vaccinated against. So they want to see if he's immune to vaccinations. He also tested positive for Covid at one point too whilst in ICU and what's even worse, when they said yes he's tested positive for Covid, you can't see him and this was at the very beginning. So this is when he's really sick and he's in a coma. Me and my husband had to go and get pcr tests done, which came back negative. So basically a normal pcr test had come back negative, but with him being in a coma, they have to take these secretions out of his chest and that was tested that came back positive and it turned out that he had the delta variant but months ago and it was still just lying on his chest. Now, me and my husband and the seven other kids have never had Covid in two years, but just him. His infectious disease doctor said that he will go into a big database and will be used for even just normal medical research and just have the wider knowledge of what's going on. When he was going to get his central line removed, his anaesthetists came along and she was the one that was there at the very beginning, and was laughing, saying, his Covid story is being used for research as they've never seen it before. They've never had a case like that before, so that's getting used for research. The sepsis, whatever comes back, it will be used. They also said as well that if something isn't picked up, but maybe years down the line, another case comes along, could help with further research as well.

Abi Dawson

And whilst Corey has made a full recovery, Aimee says the experience has made an impact on them.

Aimee

The kids are fine, I'd say it's me and my husband, we are more, we're really cautious. I find that, you know, the kids sneeze, I think, oh my goodness, what next? Checking temperatures. They all go to bed and I check every single one of them at night to make sure all is okay. There's no temperature. It's left a bit of trauma. With everything that happened, everybody was there for Corey, but for me, mentally, there wasn't much support, which I think is probably really important to raise as well for parents that go through it with children with sepsis, some support after. It really was just a case of he's better, we will see you later, but I think most of all as a family, all of us are just grateful. It's been a horrible journey, but we've come out the other end of it and I'm really grateful for everything that all the medical staff have done for Corey and they're still doing and we were lucky enough to come out the other end and he's here still. Yesterday, his second birthday, it was a massive thing because when he was lying in intensive care, I really thought I had to face the reality of him not being here. So, yeah, I probably see everything as a family going ahead is gratitude.

Abi Dawson

There's no doubt that Cy and Aimee stories will resonate with many parents with small children. We know that they both share our hope that they provided information that other parents will find helpful.

We really hope that listening to this Words Of Sepsis podcast has helped increase your awareness of sepsis. Do check out all eight episodes in the series and share them as widely as you can using them to start conversations with friends and family about sepsis. It could save a life, possibly even your own.

If you've been affected by anything you've heard, or you'd like more information about the groundbreaking research into sepsis that the charity funds please do visit our website. www.sepsisresearch.org.uk, where you can also make a donation.

You'll be helping us to save lives today and fund research for tomorrow.

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