My feet and hands were amputated after sepsis, says MP

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

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

He said they were “like plastic… you could almost punch them… they were black, drying, tight.”

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

“Then you could say I’m lucky.”

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

It was September 27 when Mr Mackinlay, 57, started feeling unwell. He didn’t think much about it, took a Covid test (which came back negative) and went to bed early.

During the night he was seriously ill, but he still didn’t think it was serious.

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

In the morning, she noticed that her arms were cold and she couldn’t feel her pulse. After calling an ambulance, Mr Mackinlay was admitted to hospital.

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

He had been in septic shock. The MP was plunged into an induced coma which lasted 16 days.

His wife was told to prepare for the worst, with staff describing her husband as “one of the sickest people they had ever seen”. His chances of survival were only 5%.

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

He doesn’t remember much about it, but what he does remember are the strange dreams he thinks were brought on by morphine.

When he came to his senses, the dark reality set in.

When he woke up, he remembered hearing people talking about his arms and legs. “By then they had turned black… you could almost punch them,” he says, comparing them to the plastic of a cell phone.

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

“I don’t have a medical degree but I know what dead things look like. I was surprisingly stoic about it… I don’t know why I was. Maybe it was because of the different cocktails of drugs that I was taking.”

The operation – for the four amputations – took place on December 1. He remembers waking up after the procedures feeling strangely alert.

So alert that he wondered if the amputations had actually happened. “But I woke up and I looked down and you obviously realize they had done it.”

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

“Honestly, probably better than anyone else. I think kids are just remarkably adaptable.”

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

Learning to walk with prosthetics took time.

He first had to rebuild the muscles that had wasted.

“My legs have never been bigger. I always say I have chicken legs, but now they’re sparrow legs.

“There was no muscle on them, it was pretty horrible. You lifted your leg and you can see a bone and sort of hanging.”

Once his prosthetic legs were fixed, he gradually learned to walk again.

“After a very short time you think, ‘I can do this’.”

On February 28, five months after feeling ill, he was able to take his first 20 steps without assistance.

Inevitably, progress came in stages. He got painful blisters in areas where his skin was fragile and had to stop for a while. “It was very frustrating. For me, walking was a sign of success,” he says.