UK dancer Taz Hoesli: Sepsis almost killed her after Strep A infection

Professional dancer Taz Hoesli had been feeling unwell for a couple of weeks before she quickly went downhill. Photo / Instagram, tazraine_

OPINION

I never thought at the age of 21, I would be in intensive care and fighting for my life, but within a few days in October 2022, my world was turned upside down.

As a professional dancer, I was thrilled when my agent said I had a callback for my dream West End show. I had been feeling quite unwell for a couple of weeks, but I had no idea that 48 hours later I would be on one of those dreaded lines of beds in A&E, listening to doctors describing that my oxygen levels were dropping very low, my condition didn’t seem to be improving, and I needed to be taken to an ICU ward and put on a ventilator.

I’d always been healthy, and never had any underlying health conditions, so when I first began developing symptoms like hot sweats followed by cold shivers and not really wanting to eat, I assumed it was just a fluey cold coming on. When my agent first called and said I had a last-minute audition in the West End, I thought: “Oh God, what bad timing, but of course I’ll go.” Performers pushing through is just what we do, and there was no way I wasn’t turning up. I had to show my face in that room.

That first audition lasted eight hours – two dance rounds and a singing round – and somehow, I made it through. But the feverish symptoms continued and that night, I began to develop a severe pain in my left shoulder and right hip which left me limping, and the following night I woke up in absolute agony at 4am, unable to sleep and screaming in pain. My parents called NHS 111 who suggested it might be Covid and that I’d likely pulled a muscle. They prescribed me strong painkillers and an anti-inflammatory and said it was likely to clear up in a few days.

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Because of those painkillers, I thought I was well enough to go for the second audition a few days later. I dragged myself from Oxford to London and that’s the last thing I remember until being rushed to intensive care. My parents told me that I was barely coherent, unable to form full sentences and breathing really quickly, and so they called 111 again. To this day, I don’t know the name of that 111 clinician, but I absolutely owe her my life because she told my dad: “I don’t want to scare you, but it sounds like your daughter has sepsis. I’m going to ring you an ambulance, and I just want you to keep saying to them, it could be sepsis.”

Being in intensive care was the most terrifying thing because there’s a lot of noises and people rushing about, and I was on a high flow oxygen ventilator, being pumped full of broad-spectrum antibiotics. A couple of days later, they had time to test blood samples and they found that I’d had an invasive Strep A infection, which was everywhere at the time, and it had caused septic arthritis, which was why I had so much pain in my hip and shoulder. It had also resulted in respiratory failure which was why my oxygen levels had dropped so low.

I spent six or seven days in total in intensive care and then when I was moved back to the ward, I started to recover more quickly, and I was home within 10 days. My overwhelming feeling was just gratitude that I’m still here because there were points where we didn’t think that would happen. That autumn, lots of children sadly lost their lives from sepsis as a result of invasive Strep A infections, so I feel very grateful and lucky to be alive.

However, the whole recovery process has been much longer than I expected. There’s lots of side effects after sepsis, like fatigue which is something I never thought I would experience at 21 years old. Even something as simple as getting out of bed and walking to the toilet would leave me completely out of breath. I also had a lot of hair loss; I had a bald patch on the back of my head for a while which really knocked my confidence.

That all really took a toll on me, even though I’m a very positive person. I think not enough is spoken about how hard that recovery process is, and I’ve been in close contact with the UK Sepsis Trust. We’re trying to change things so that sepsis patients get more information when they leave the hospital. In my case, the attitude was very much, “We’ve done our job on our end, and you’re alive, so we’re just going to send you home.” If I hadn’t discovered the UK Sepsis Trust, I would have been completely in the dark.

The infection also caused a little bit of damage to my joints so I’ve been in constant rehab for the last year. I’m much better now, I’m finally starting to get back to classes, but I’m not audition-ready yet. I’m hoping I’ll be able to start doing that at the beginning of next year and get back to that performing dream.

Before all of this happened, my family had never heard of sepsis, but it’s so important that people know to ask medical professionals whether their illness might be sepsis. You don’t lose anything from that, but if the question isn’t asked, it’s very common for someone to go from being completely fine to losing their life in just 24 hours. So that’s really something that needs to be more publicly known.