Kati Mackinlay: ‘Paramedics took an hour to send Craig to hospital – any later and he’d have died’

Deep inside Kati Mackinlay’s Georgian home in Kent, filled with workmen doing renovations, I can hear the voice of her husband Craig. This is the 57-year-old former Tory MP for South Thanet and all-round total hero who returned to the House of Commons on May 22 to a standing ovation after a quadruple amputation caused by sepsis.

He’s issuing commanding orders: Swipe down; swipe down; swipe left; swipe right. Inside their cosy TV room, the outgoing Kent MP is catching up on news and work via his voice-activated iPhone. There are two plates of toast crumbs next to him on the sofa, where he has had breakfast with his five-year-old daughter, Olivia, while watching the Matilda film. 

He doesn’t have hands or feet or forearms or shins. One high-spec “bionic” arm is on the cushion beside him. He wanted to be known as the “bionic MP” until Rishi Sunak called the general election and Parliament was dissolved. He waves his standard-issue NHS prosthetic arm at me, worn on the left, and asks me – with the same good black humour that he used on return to Parliament – “What good is this?” He has a point.

Kati, 44, has already told me he is impatient; that he wants to pull up his own trousers and feed himself with his own knife and fork.

“It will cost £50,000 to buy this”, he says gesturing to the bionic arm. Two would cost £100,000. “I’ll have to wait four years to get it for free.” He shakes his head. Such poor prosthetic limb provision is on his campaign radar, as is sepsis, which very nearly took his life back in September. 

It has been six months since Craig Mackinlay’s four limbs were amputated on December 1, two arms below the elbow, two legs below the knee, the catastrophic result of fast-moving sepsis which set in on September 27, caused by his body’s reaction to an unusual pneumococcal infection. He had no outward red flag symptoms of sepsis, no signs of pneumonia. No early vomiting. No change in temperature. No change in heart rate. He just didn’t feel well. And then he started to change colour.

ICU doctors at Medway Hospital in Kent, who saved his life, said it was one of – if not the – fastest developing case of sepsis they had ever seen, an infection which normally develops over seven to 10 days. For Craig, it took 12 hours. 

It presented first as Covid-like symptoms, Kati remembers. She made him take three tests, all negative, “but I just thought there wasn’t enough Covid to register yet.” She is a pharmacist from Hungary (she has been married to Mackinlay for 12 years). Her mother is a pharmacist. Her brother is a doctor, her sister is a doctor, both working nearby, and her brother-in-law is a senior consultant in A&E in Tunbridge Wells. She has all sorts of medical equipment at home, including the blood saturation monitor.

All of this was to become relevant because, as it turned out, Kati Mackinlay was forced to advocate for her husband just before his admission into ICU (where the care was exceptional) and then afterwards when talk started of amputation, his limbs turning black from toxic shock. Today, she says Craig would have died had it not been for what she calls “the boys” pushing the 999 call handlers to send an ambulance, questioning paramedics, challenging the triage system. 

“Craig just complained of not feeling well,” says Kati as we sit on the sofa in her drawing room. Craig had felt under the weather around 10am on September 27, had a lie down, chatted to builders, given a radio interview, but had gone to bed before 8.30pm. The bed was later drenched with sweat, “but I thought it was a fever,” says Kati.

“We were due to go away to Turkey the next day. He kept saying he was fine but finally allowed me to move the flights back a few days. His temperature was fine. In the morning, his hands were a strange colour. I started to panic, although I hid it because I knew something was wrong. It could be sepsis.”

The sepsis almost took his life. His kidneys packed up as did his liver. He was taken to Medway Hospital in Kent and placed in an induced coma for 16 days as the toxic shock crept through his body. The strength of Mackinlay’s heart both masked the symptoms of sepsis as it took hold but also helped to save his life: “Normally it would have been really racing.”

It was Kati who phoned 999 twice, insisting her husband wasn’t well. Where was the ambulance? He was a very weird shade of white, “and I had to go through all the questions of, ‘was he breathing?’ I even had to put him on the phone to them. He was just telling me to put the phone down, that he’d be okay.”

The ambulance took just over half an hour to arrive from Kati’s first call. The paramedics then spent another hour in the house, checking Craig over. It could be diabetes, they said, as his blood sugar was very low – diabetes runs in his family. Kati made him toast with jam and honey and a sweet cup of tea, allowing herself to think that if it was diabetes, that was manageable.

“How easy is it to get him a GP appointment?” the paramedics then asked. She suddenly realised there was a risk he’d be left at home. “I said, ‘I really do think he needs to be checked out in hospital’. My brother, a doctor, arrived at the same time as the ambulance, and tried to intervene: ‘Don’t you think Craig might need some intravenous fluid?’ ‘We are in charge’, they said. They finally agreed to take him to hospital saying, ‘yes, he is a bit young for all of this’. Later, they visited his room when he was very ill, and I couldn’t talk to them. I was so angry.”

By the time he was in A&E triage, his ears were navy, “like the colour of my dress,” she says, gesturing to herself. “He kept saying ‘I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.’”

He was rushed to the resuscitation unit and tested for sepsis. It was positive. He was fighting for his life, on four different intravenous antibiotics as doctors tried to find the source of the infection that started the body’s reaction. Does she think that lost hour was a contributory factor? “Who knows,” says Kati. “Any later he’d have been dead. Earlier and we might have been sent home from hospital with paracetamol and ibuprofen.” 

The ICU team at Medway Hospital was exceptional during the 10-day waiting game. Kati printed off family photographs and stuck them on the ceiling above him while Craig was in the coma.

“For the first two nights, I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t swallow. I was sick. I have never been through anything so distressing and dreadful.”

“I kept thinking: How did this happen? How did we get here? I sent messages to friends, family saying, just ask the universe for help for us to get him through. I was never prepared to say goodbye to Craig, ever. I never promised him that I would look after Olivia. They told me he had a five per cent chance, that he was the sickest person in the hospital. But I thought five per cent is good enough.”

On days five, six and seven, Craig’s thumbs were showing permanent discolouration. Blisters were appearing on his arms. Bluish colour was creeping up his body.

Two weeks in, Kati was forced to advocate for Craig again, this time to protect his body. A vascular consultant from another Kent hospital arrived. Craig’s limbs, now bandaged, would need to be cut off at the armpit and groin, he told Kati. Temporarily out of the coma, Craig was pulling up his legs due to stomach cramps.

“How on earth could somebody be suggesting the legs be cut off at the groin when he could move them?” I challenged the doctor. “It’s reflex,” he said. “I knew the difference between reflex and movement.”

“I remember when there was early talk of amputating his toes, I had thought, ‘but he loves sailing. How will he balance?’ It’s funny how the goal posts change.” 

On top of delivering the devastating news about amputation – which she refused to accept – the consultant told her that a “do-not-resuscitate” form should be signed because, as the consultant said, ‘I wouldn’t wish that [life] on my brother.’

“And I thought: ‘you keep that [wish] for your brother then’,” Kati remembers.

“I just couldn’t believe it. How he was preparing to cut something off which didn’t look great but was still working. When I told him I wanted a second independent opinion, he said: ‘If you think there is some fancy examination or treatment available in London...’ I stopped him and said: ‘Don’t you dare use those words to me.’ And I think our lovely ICU doctors who were on our side knew that I wasn’t going to leave the room until it was moved forward.”

As Kati Mackinlay points out, Craig’s life would be very different today if the amputations were above all four joints. “With the arm, for example, the bone was alive above the elbow. So the consultant plastic surgeon in London, Edmund Fitzgerald O’Connor, rebuilt the arm with about a foot of tissue from Craig’s leg. It became all about saving length [of limbs].

“I said: ‘I want an independent review, preferably in London or any big teaching hospital in the UK.”

Within hours, a team at St Thomas’s Hospital London, led by Fitzgerald O’Connor, was prepped to receive Craig (he was transferred a few days later in the middle of October). In the first Zoom with the London team, which included Craig’s father, his friend Adam Holloway, the MP for Gravesend, and all of their family, Kati felt relief: “The manager of the St Thomas’s rehab centre told me: ‘We will make sure your husband can walk your daughter down the aisle.’”

Kati’s eyes fill with tears: “That was all I needed at that stage: hope.”

Life settled into a routine. Olivia was with her cousins. Pickles, marmalade, apple pies, books for children, encouraging books for Kati, and flowers were arriving at the house, which was being looked after by Kati’s parents. Up until the last minute, Kati was hopeful of saving Craig’s limbs. Craig has a degree in Zoology. He had wanted to be a doctor himself. He told her: “Come on darling; I think we can see what is happening here, can’t we?”

“I was a bit naïve. But we’d had so many miracles. Why not another one?”

A psychology team was on hand, “but Craig is a very practical, matter-of-fact person. Of course, it is tragic that he lost his legs, feet and hands but he could have had a kidney issue, a liver issue for the rest of his life. He talks the same way, he jokes the same way, he loves the same way. In a strange way, we consider ourselves extremely lucky. ICU doctors saved him. He is back.”

On November 30, Kati made a video recording of Craig, “as a memory of his limbs and also because he’d already started talking about making a documentary.” She also bulk ordered buckets of modelling kits on Amazon to capture Craig’s feet and hands, which friends brought to the hospital. “In the end, the hospital stopped that as his limbs were so hard [and black]; they were worried they would break.” On December 1, after six weeks of waiting in St Thomas’s, the operation took place.

Today, Craig is wearing his two prosthetic legs, visible from his rolled-up trousers. Walking is easy; stairs too. Adaptations have barely been necessary.

He is, however, no longer looking to stand in July’s General Election: “with the early call of the election,” Kati says, “he realised that he couldn’t push his physical limits.” He plans instead to have a portfolio career. Money is not a concern. “He is still a partner in his accountancy firm, specialising in tax advice.”

“I’m secretly pleased,” Kati says of the election. She used to travel to watch him in the House of Commons so much during David Cameron’s premiership that MPs joked she had a season ticket.

“But it’s a thankless job. And we will get to spend much more time as a family.” Craig holds up the truncheon arm, and says, cheekily: “Hopefully I qualify for special [inclusion and diversity] consideration when I’m applying for my non-exec director roles.”

There are campaigns ahead: sepsis awareness, bringing down the prohibitive cost of a decent prosthetic arm and the long wait on the NHS. The smart loo he qualified for on the NHS failed to materialise, so he bought one. There was an unnecessary delay with his early application to drive.

“But I don’t want to bash the NHS. It saved my life,” says Craig. 

When he received his standing ovation by the entire House – normally not allowed – Kati and Olivia were there: “It was just very very wonderful. Olivia keeps saying to Craig: ‘I think you should be an MP again Daddy.’”

So perhaps he’ll sit this one out and then go again?

Kati Mackinlay smiles: “We shall see what the future brings.”