My feet and hands were amputated after sepsis – MP – BBC News

Conservative MP Craig Mackinlay is due to return to Parliament for the first time after suffering a life-threatening episode of sepsis which led to the amputation of his hands and feet.

The South Thanet MP recalled the shock of waking from an induced coma to find his limbs had turned completely black.

He says they were “like plastic…you could almost knock them…they were black, desiccating, clenched”.

“They managed to save above the elbows and above the knees,” he added.

“So you might say I’m lucky.”

Speaking to the BBC, he said he now he wants to be known as the first “bionic MP”, after he was fitted with prosthetic legs and hands.

It was on 27 September, when Mr Mackinlay, 57, began feeling unwell. He didn’t think much of it, took a Covid test (which came back negative) and had an early night.

During the night he was badly sick but still didn’t think it was anything serious.

However, as the night wore on, his wife Kati – a pharmacist – began to get worried and tested his blood pressure and temperature.

By the morning, she noticed that his arms felt cold and she couldn’t feel a pulse. After ringing for an ambulance, Mr Mackinlay was admitted to hospital.

Within half an hour he had turned what he calls “a very strange blue”. “My whole body, top to bottom, ears, everything, blue,” he says.

He had gone into septic shock. The MP was put into an induced coma that would last for 16 days.

His wife was told she should prepare for the worst, with staff describing her husband as “one of the illest people they’d ever seen”. His chances of survival stood at just 5%.

At his wife’s insistence, Mr Mackinlay was transported from his local hospital in Medway, Kent, to St Thomas’ in central London, directly opposite his workplace, the Houses of Parliament.

He remembers little of this – but what he can remember is the strange dreams which he thinks were brought on by morphine.

As he came to, the grim reality set in.

On waking up, he remembers hearing discussions about his arms and legs. “By then they had turned black…you could almost knock them,” he says, likening them to the plastic of a mobile phone.

He says he wasn’t surprised when he was told they might have to be amputated.

“I haven’t got a medical degree but I know what dead things look like. I was surprisingly stoic about it… I don’t know why I was. It might have been the various cocktail of drugs I was on.”

The operation – for all four amputations – was on 1 December. He remembers waking up following the procedures feeling strangely alert.

So alert, he wondered if the amputations had actually happened at all. “But I woke up and I looked down and you obviously realise that they had.”

Christmas was “sombre”, spent with his family, including his four-year-old daughter Olivia. “She adapted to it very easily,” says Mr Mackinlay.

“Probably better than anybody else frankly. I think children are just so remarkably adjustable.”

Olivia has had to adapt to her father’s new prosthetic legs – one he has nicknamed Albert, after the dummy used by war camp prisoners in the 1950s film, Albert R.N.

Learning to walk with his prosthetics has taken time.

First, he had to re-build the muscles which had wasted away.

“My legs have never been big – I always say I’ve got chicken legs, but now they are sparrow legs.

“There was no muscle on them at all, it was quite horrible. You picked up your leg and you can see a bone and a bit of sort of hanging.”

Once his prosthetic legs were attached he gradually relearnt how to walk.

“After a really quite quick time you think ‘I can do this’.”

On 28 February – five months after first feeling ill – he was able to walk his first 20 steps unaided.

Inevitably progress was stop-start. He got painful blisters in areas where his skin had broken down and had to stop for a bit. “That was very frustrating – for me walking was my sign of success,” he says.