‘I’m one of the lucky ones’: Ciaran Whelan opens up about his battle with ‘silent killer’
Former Dublin star Ciaran Whelan has said he was “one of the lucky ones” to have been quickly diagnosed and treated after falling ill with sepsis, .
The RTÉ pundit became ill after working on The Sunday Game in early July and his condition quickly deteriorated, leading to him calling an ambulance later that week.
It was only when the doctors diagnosed the illness that Whelan first heard of sepsis, which can cause septic shock and be fatal.
“I was in studio all day Sunday, went home that evening, I got out of the car and I started shivering,” he told Today With Sean O'Rourke on RTÉ Radio 1.
“I had a kind of a fever, and like most men I thought I had man flu. I took to bed for 24 hours in the hope that it would pass. I noticed a slight muscular pain in the back of my knee. I thought maybe I'd overstretched in my sleep and I didn’t think much of it, but it steadily got worse over the next 24, 36 hours.
“My fever got worse, I was vomiting. The time came when I was struggling to walk and at that stage I presented myself to Beaumont Hospital. When I got in there, it was very quickly identified.
“My inflammatory bloods, which should be between zero and five, were 450. I was rushed straight through A&E and it turned out I'd developed the blood infection sepsis in my left leg.
“I was very lucky. I went in by ambulance and I was seen immediately. I didn't know what sepsis was, being honest with you. It is a silent killer and we're seeing a significant increase of it. I think there were 14,000 cases of sepsis last year in Ireland, an increase of 67%. The stats are frightening.
“I consider myself one of the lucky ones that they identified there was a serious infection in my blood and I got on the antibiotics straight away. It didn’t get to my organs, which obviously would have been fatal.
“I could have been sitting in A&E for two, three, four hours and that could have been fatal.”
Sepsis is caused by an immune system reaction to an infection, but doctors still can’t pinpoint why Whelan got the illness.
“A lot of people say 'Did you have a cut? Did you have a nick of some sort?' They don't know where it came from.
“I had no break in my skin. I had a pain in the back of my leg. It can only be put down to the fact that my immune system was low and toxins got in to my body.”
Whelan says he’s still not 100% and hopes to raise awareness of the condition.
“It was a huge factor that I was relatively fit.
“You look at sepsis and you look at young kids that can contract it. Sometimes it can be diagnosed as viral. People can contract it after operations, hip replacements, and older people. They're probably more vulnerable in terms of surviving and recovering from it.”
