Dad who caught stomach bug on camping trip ends up having both legs cut off
A dad-of-two who fell ill with a stomach bug on a camping trip with his family ended up having both his legs amputated.
Surgeon Neil Hopper has removed thousands of limbs during his career but never expected to be on the operating table himself, a private source reports.
His ordeal began on a family trip to woodlands with wife Rachel, 42, and children Evie, 10, and Harry, six, when he and his daughter fell ill with stomach bugs.
But while Evie recovered, Neil went on to develop pneumonia, then sepsis, where the body has an extreme response to an infection and is a life-threatening emergency.
If not treated quickly enough, it can lead to tissue damage, organ failure, and death.
It caused Neil, 44 from Swansea, irreversible damage to his legs that meant they had to be removed.
“My daughter got better but I didn’t, so my family abandoned me at home thinking I just had a stomach bug,” he told Cornwall Live.
“I started feeling a bit achey so took some paracetamol and went to bed. The next thing I really remember is being in intensive care.
“My wife Rachel [a clinical matron in cancer services] had phoned me and I’d spoken gibberish so she’d called my colleague Rachel Barnes who came round. Luckily I’d left the front door open and she called an ambulance.
“I remember my feet hurting a lot. There was nothing surgically that could be done to improve the blood supply to my legs, so the only option was to go to Plymouth to have hyperbaric oxygen therapy.”
Neil was placed in a diving chamber and made to breathe 100% oxygen for three hours a day for two weeks.
“It was tough, really tough,” he said. “It was like being in a test tube for hours which was pretty tough going … and it didn’t work.
“I ended up having an operation where they took all my toes off and when they did that they realised that everything was a lot worse than expected.
“They spent a week getting plastic surgeons down to see if they could save my feet and it turned out they might have been able to save my left foot but it would have involved a lot of operations and the results were likely to be poor.”
Neil opted for both his legs to be amputated below the knee. The operation took place the day after his wife’s birthday last May.
Recovery was long, painful and exhausting, involving intense physiotherapy and rehab training but he had to wait nearly two months for treatment after leaving hospital.
