After surviving a rare heart condition and sepsis, I'm thankful to be on my third life

In an exclusive dispatch from his hospital bed, police officer turned author Gary Wright reveals how after missing the warning signs of sepsis he nearly became one of an estimated 48,000 Brits a year who die from the deadly disease

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Sepsis is a killer. I know this first hand, having attended the funeral of an old acquaintance a few years back. And in the past six months or so, it has been prominent in my mind after seeing the impact it has had on my local MP, Craig (now Lord) Mackinlay, who was robbed of his limbs. Even so, I never thought it would be something that would affect me.

But I'm writing this from my bed on the cardiac ward of St Bartholomew's Hospital in London, where I have been for the past six weeks.

Barts is “my” hospital. I am under care there in relation to a hereditary and incurable disease of the heart (arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy), diagnosed completely out of the blue when I was a fit and healthy 28-year-old policeman, some 14 years ago.

Seven weeks ago, I was at home when all of a sudden I felt flush with fever just before bedtime. I felt a burning sensation on my back and between my shoulders, radiating through my neck, and I honestly thought I'd got a touch of sunburn from jet-washing all day.

I went to bed that night, and it only got worse. Sweats that caused sodden bedsheets, those dreams of delirium where nothing makes sense yet they repeat themselves over and over, a fever that breached 41C and beyond, and nausea that led to vomit.

I'd had flu only a few months previously (proper flu, not the “man” strain), and it felt very similar to that. And so, to my eternal chagrin, I remained in my bed for five long and desperate days while my symptoms only got worse, thinking it was something I could manage with a course of paracetamol and a solid dose of water on repeat.

How wrong. How naive. How stupid, in hindsight.