“At first I thought it was Norovirus. I’ve had it in the past.”

Adam, a 32-year-old American football player and coach warns of sepsis symptoms after his own dramatic experience.

Adam, from Liverpool, admits, he isn’t always the type of person to speak to a doctor so when he first felt ill he just took some cold remedy and tried to get on with it.

“I was playing Xbox with friends when I felt like I was coming down with something. I started feeling cold, that type of cold when you have flu or a virus,” says Adam. But after five days of thinking it was just a virus, he started to feel much worse. He was unable to move around very much and wasn’t eating. It was on day six that he started to suffer nosebleeds.

“I started getting nosebleeds that wouldn’t stop. I live alone and that night my mum came around after work. The nose bleeds had stopped so she didn’t see how bad they had been,” says Adam. But his nosebleeds had only stopped temporarily. By the next day, which he remembers as 18^th February, the nosebleeds had become worse, with him losing a lot of blood and he started to become confused.

“I was on the phone for what I thought was 30 minutes with my mum. Afterward, I was told it was less than three minutes on the phone. I had no idea what was going on. My brother came around and called an ambulance. The ambulance turned up and blue lighted me to the hospital.”

Adam was admitted to intensive care with round-the-clock, one-to-one care for a few days before he was moved to a high dependency unit (HDU). But Adam’s symptoms became worse. He says: “I started to get pains in my lower back and legs and soon was unable to walk by myself. The amount of weight and muscle loss resulted in me being in this pain, and weakness in my lower back and legs. After MRIs and others tests, they couldn’t find anything else like infections that could be causing this.”

After five days in HDU, Adam was moved onto a recovery ward where he was informed by the doctors of his condition, that he had sepsis and E. coli, at which point he realized just how serious his condition was. “The doctors said, ‘if you were a couple of hours later to the hospital you would be dead, and if we didn’t have the modern medicine we do now, you would be dead.”

After a few days on the ward with physiotherapy and a lot of medicines and pain relief, Adam was discharged, but it was far from a return to normal life. He explains: “This was the hard part. With no wheelchair, getting around was very hard and painful. What is normally less than a two-minute walk to my living room took over 45 minutes on a Zimmer with help from my parents.”

Adam says that his family didn’t know what to do when it all started, but he has had fantastic help from them and friends with support to get back to normal. “My mum gave up her rented home, sold a lot of her stuff to move, and two of my brothers in with me to be able to look after me during my recovery. My whole family including parents, siblings, and other family members and friends have been amazing with all the support.”

Adam’s employer QVC, where he had been working in the call centre for six months, supported him during his recovery with his team leader always in touch with Adam’s family.

What Adam now wants to do is to make people more aware of sepsis and its symptoms so they know what to look for, should they become ill. He came across Sepsis Research FEAT on Instagram and wants his story to be told to help to raise awareness. He is also using his platform of NFL competitions to raise money to help Sepsis Research FEAT.

Adam says: “I am now trying to make more people aware of sepsis and its symptoms. I am now back to coaching and playing American football and getting back to normal life, but I can’t thank everyone enough for helping me after all this, mainly my parents and family and my close friends and business partner.”