Skye Owen (26) from the English city of Newquay survived by a hair’s breadth after her doctors repeatedly claimed that her excruciating back pain was just “sciatica”. However, she was actually suffering from sepsis – with a life-threatening infection, which the medical staff did not detect until the fourth attempt, he writes
A young woman started experiencing hip pain in September 2024 after a weekend full of hiking, surfing and climbing. “I thought I had done something while surfing or had an accident, which was not unusual,” she said. When the pain spread to her lower back a few days later, she made an appointment with a doctor. The doctor told her it was sciatica and sent her home to rest.
However, within hours the pain became unbearable. Her parents called 911, where they were told again that it was probably sciatica. The same diagnosis was later made by a doctor who visited Skye outside of office hours. “It was no longer just movement pain, it was constant and throbbing down my left leg and up my back,” Skye described.
The next morning, the young woman could barely move. “The ambulance didn’t come until around lunchtime and they still had no idea what was wrong with me. They didn’t think it was serious,” she explained, adding that her parents insisted on taking her to the hospital. There they did several scans, but at first they investigated her incorrectly. “They did X-rays of my back, but they focused on the nerves because they still thought it was sciatica,” he says. At the end of her first day in the hospital, her doctor told her she could go home.
“It’s scary to think that if I could move, I’d be gone — and probably die,” she recalls. It wasn’t until she developed a fever that doctors did a more detailed MRI scan, which revealed septic arthritis in the hip joint and advanced sepsis. Skye had surgery, during which they removed the infection from her joint and put her on antibiotics. “The doctor told me I was very close to death. The pain was so terrible that I wished it would end,” she continued.
After a month in the hospital, she was released home to her parents, where she was learning to walk again. After the operation, she suffered nerve damage, due to which she still cannot feel part of her leg. Although the pain has improved, she feels it will stay with her forever. A year after the diagnosis, he still undergoes regular blood tests, MRI scans and visits a physical therapist.
Skye still doesn’t know how she got sepsis, but she urges others to trust their instincts and fight for doctors to listen to them. “I felt that something was wrong. I know my body and my pain threshold. If the doctors don’t listen to you, insist. It could be life-threatening,” she concluded. A spokesperson for the Royal Cornwall Hospital responded that they had learned from this case and implement new initiatives to improve awareness and early diagnosis of time-critical conditions such as sepsis.
