“It wasn’t fresher’s flu. It was sepsis – and it almost killed me.”
In September 2021, Georgia Coulson was 20 years old, fit, healthy, and about to start her third year studying Mathematics at the University of Bristol. It was Freshers’ Week again – full of energy, possibility, and social interactions that every student knows. When Georgia began to feel unwell, she did what most students do: she pushed on.
“I thought it was just fresher’s flu,” she says. “I went to the Freshers’ Fair, I socialised, I even went for a few runs. It didn’t really cross my mind that it could be something serious.”
But something wasn’t right. Georgia’s condition deteriorated – chest pain, difficulty breathing, uncontrollable shivering. She skipped a party on the Friday night because she simply felt too ill. With her GP out of hours, she called 111.
Gut instinct said something more was wrong…
An out-of-hours appointment was arranged for the following day. By the time she was seen by a nurse practitioner, she could barely stand. The nurse suspected appendicitis and sent her straight to A&E. An ambulance would take hours, so a friend stepped up and gave her a lift.
At triage, Georgia’s blood pressure registered at just 69/45, so low that the nurses thought the machine was broken.
Georgia was admitted and tests began. It wasn’t appendicitis. It was pneumonia, and sepsis. Pneumonia had taken hold in Georgia’s body and triggered a catastrophic immune response leading to sepsis: one of medicine’s most dangerous conditions, and one that Georgia had never heard of.
Within hours, Georgia’s condition deteriorated rapidly. Her oxygen levels were critically low. Doctors were unable to stabilise her and she was transferred to the Intensive Care Unit at Bristol Royal Infirmary, where her body was already experiencing multiple organ failure and septic shock.
She was medically sedated and placed into an induced coma.
“I don’t remember any of it,” Georgia says. “The next thing I knew, I woke up and my mum told me I’d been in a coma for over two weeks. I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t talk properly. I couldn’t even swallow.”
During those 17 days, Georgia’s heart was affected - septic cardiomyopathy - and she required CPR. A lung abscess burst, causing a collapse; surgeons performed emergency drainage and at one point considered removing at least part of her lung.
For Georgia’s family, the weeks in ICU were an ordeal of their own. Unable to do anything but wait, they turned to whatever information they could find. “They found being able to read about sepsis through resources from charities like Sepsis Research FEAT a real way to cope,” Georgia says. “Just understanding what was happening made a difference.”
Georgia spent a further two weeks in hospital after waking up. The early days were spent relearning the basics - walking, talking, swallowing. The weeks and months that followed were spent rebuilding her strength, deferring her final year of university, and working through the trauma of what had happened.
In the months following, she experienced significant hair loss; a side effect of sepsis that caught her completely off guard.
“I’d never heard of sepsis before,” she says. “I was young, I was fit, I was active. It didn’t even occur to me that this could happen to someone like me.” She was frightened that it would happen again.
What helped Georgia most in recovery was hearing from other people who had been through something similar and gone on to lead normal lives after such an ordeal.
Today, Georgia is 25, living in Manchester, and working as an engineering consultant. Fortunately, she is still able to do what she enjoys most- running, playing squash, netball and badminton, travelling and cooking. She is, by any measure, back.
But she hasn’t forgotten. And she doesn’t want others to face what she faced without the knowledge that could make all the difference:
“Know the symptoms. Know that ‘feeling a bit rough’ in Freshers’ Week might not be fresher’s flu. Trust your instincts. Tell someone – a friend, a flatmate, a parent. If something feels wrong, it’s worth asking the question: could this be sepsis?”
Why sepsis research matters
Georgia had no idea what sepsis was until she survived it.
Sepsis Research FEAT exists to not only raise awareness, but to advance the research needed to transform sepsis care. By supporting scientific discovery, we aim to deliver earlier diagnosis, more effective treatments, and better outcomes, so that fewer young people wake up in intensive care to be told how close they came to losing their lives.
“Maybe if I’d known the signs earlier, it wouldn’t have got quite so bad,” she says. That’s why this research matters. The answers exist. We just need to find them.
This is backed up by Dr Catharina Hartman, A&E Consultant & Trustee, Sepsis Research FEAT who says “The difference between recovering and not recovering can come down to hours. Better tools, faster diagnosis, smarter treatment… that’s what the research is working towards.”
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Charity Comment:
Sepsis Research FEAT is so grateful to Georgia for sharing her story with Sepsis Research FEAT as part of its student sepsis awareness campaign. If you are a student who has suffered with sepsis and would like to share your story, please get in touch. Raising awareness of sepsis saves lives.