Liam Conner
A UK lawmaker who lost his hands and feet after suffering septic shock is now back at work. And he hopes to bring with him a new title, such as the country’s “bionic deputy.”
Craig Mackinlay, a Conservative Member of the UK Parliament serving South Thanet, told CBS News Partner BBC that he started feeling unwell on September 27 last year. After a negative COVID test, he went to sleep. His wife Kati is a pharmacist and kept an eye on his condition while he slept and, in the morning, she became extremely worried after his arms became cold and she was unable to detect a pulse.
Half an hour after being admitted to hospital, Mackinlay said his entire body, “from top to bottom”, turned “a very strange blue”. He was diagnosed with septic shock and placed in a coma for just over two weeks.
Septic shock is the “most severe stage of sepsis” — an extreme infection reaction that causes your organs to fail and your blood pressure to become “extremely low,” according to the Cleveland Clinic. The potentially fatal sepsis stage can also cause brain damage and gangrene as well as lung, heart and kidney failure.
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Health professionals told Kati that her husband was “one of the sickest people they had ever seen” and had just a 5% chance of surviving, Mackinlay told the BBC. When he finally woke up, his arms and legs “had turned black” to the point where he “could almost drop them.” Sepsis also scarred his face and gums, leaving him with some loose teeth.
“I’m not trained in medicine, but I know what dead things look like,” he told the BBC. “I was surprisingly stoic about it. It must have been because of the various drug cocktails I was taking.”
On December 1st, his hands and feet were amputated. And it wasn’t long before he got prosthetics for his lost limbs – a solution that was welcome but difficult to adapt to.
“There was no muscle in them, it was horrible,” he said. “You picked up his leg and you could see a bone and some kind of hanging.”
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After spending weeks building the necessary muscles and getting used to his new way of moving, Mackinlay finally took his first 20 steps on his own on February 28.
“After a really quick time, you think, ‘I can do this,'” he said. “…Walking was my sign of success.”
Getting used to his new hands, however, was a little more difficult. Even with prosthetics, he said, “hands are a real loss.”
“You don’t realize how much you do with your hands… use your cell phone, hold your son’s hand, touch your wife, garden.”
But Mackinlay is not interested in “groaning and complaining or being depressed about things you can’t do.” Instead, he wants to become known as the “bionic deputy” and work on a campaign to educate others about sepsis.
“When children arrive at Parliament’s fantastic education center, I want them to pull on their parents’ or their teacher’s coat or skirt and say, ‘I want to see the bionic MP today’,” he said. “…You have to be joyful and positive about the things you can do and I find that every day there is something new I can do.”
Li Cohen
