One of the hardest features I've ever had to write concerned my then 25-year-old daughter, Amy, who almost died from food poisoning in 2002. Reading about the latest E.coli outbreak in Germany brings it all back to me.
Amy had just started a new job as a teaching assistant in Lancaster, when she rang and asked if she could come home for the weekend. Surprised, as she had recently found herself a flat, her Dad and I said yes and awaited her arrival. She didn't make it.
After further frantic calls saying she was violently sick and unable to walk, we collected her from Lancaster. Within 24 hours she was in Blackpool Victoria Hospital with acute kidney failure. She was transferred to the Intensive Care Unit of the Royal Preston Hospital where she remained for the next six months.
Amy had HUS (Haemolytic Uraemic Syndrome), a deadly complication of E.coli that usually affects young children. It caused major organ failure from which she was not expected to recover. As a vegetarian she had not eaten contaminted beef which, at the time, was thought to be the major culprit.
Against all the odds, Amy eventually came out of the coma, unable to walk or speak, and unaware of what had happened to her. The school in Lancaster kept her job open for her and, almost a year to the day, she returned to work, to an amazing welcome.
Today she is happy and healthy and engaged to be married. Her story is a wonderful testament to the doctors at Preston who told us that her case was so rare, they didn't know how to treat it.
My heart goes out to the families in Germany.
You can read a version of Amy's story on the HUSH website:www.ecoli-uk.com under testimonies.
