My feet and hands were amputated after sepsis, says MP

Conservative MP Craig Mackinlay returns to Parliament for the first time on Wednesday after suffering a life-threatening episode of sepsis that led to the amputation of his hands and feet.

Speaking to the BBC, the South Thanet MP recalled his experience of falling ill, his recovery and the shock of waking from an induced coma to find his limbs had turned completely black.

He says his arms and legs were “like plastic… you could almost hit them… they were black, drying, clenched together.”

“They managed to save above the elbows and above the knees,” he added. “So you could say I’m lucky.”

Now he wants to be known as the first ‘bionic MP’, after being fitted with prosthetic legs and hands.

It was on September 27 when 57-year-old Mackinlay started feeling unwell. He didn’t think much of 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 anything serious.

However, as the night wore on, his wife Kati, a pharmacist, became concerned and tested his blood pressure and temperature.

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

Within half an hour it had turned into 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 sixteen days.

His wife was told to prepare for the worst, with staff describing her husband as “one of the worst people they had ever seen”. His chances of survival were only 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 does remember are the strange dreams that he believes were caused by morphine.

When he came to, the grim reality dawned on him.

When he woke up, he remembered hearing discussions 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. It could have been the different cocktail of drugs I was taking.”

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

So alert that he wondered whether the amputations had even taken place. “But I woke up and looked down and you clearly realize that they had.”

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

“Honestly, probably better than anyone else. I think children are so remarkably flexible.’

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

Learning to walk with his prosthetics took time.

First he had to rebuild the muscles that had wasted away.

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

“There were no muscles on it at all, it was pretty horrible. You pick up your leg and you see a bone and kind of hanging.”

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

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

On February 28 – five months after he first felt ill – he was able to walk his first twenty steps without assistance.

Progress was inevitably a stop-start. He developed painful blisters in places where his skin had broken off and had to stop for a while. “That was very frustrating; for me, walking was my sign of success,” he says.