Young woman's brush with sepsis highlights dangers of dismissing severe symptoms

Elle Black woke up the morning after a night out in February 2024 feeling as though she'd been hit by something. The 21-year-old Cardiff University student, in her first year, had a sore throat and the kind of flu-like exhaustion she assumed came from the previous evening. She took ibuprofen, went back to sleep, and tried not to think about it.

But the next day was worse. She was running a high fever, completely drained of energy, and her tonsils had swollen so much she couldn't eat. She had planned brunch with her parents that day and went anyway, though something felt genuinely wrong. By afternoon she'd booked a private GP appointment. The doctor diagnosed laryngitis and prescribed antibiotics. Elle was so drowsy and confused by this point that the details blurred together. She barely remembers the following day, though she was later told she'd called her mother and said she couldn't feel her legs.

What had started as a sore throat had become quinsy—a pus-filled abscess that forms between the tonsils and the throat wall—and that had turned into sepsis. She made it to the University Hospital of Wales, where staff triaged her within fifteen minutes. Two days in hospital, and she recovered fully. The doctors were clear about one thing: if she'd waited another day, the outcome could have been entirely different.

Elle is now 21, having graduated this summer with a degree in journalism, media and culture. She remembers very little of those crucial hours—the confusion, the fever, the sense that her body was shutting down. What she does remember is her parents' faces. Her mother has described it as the scariest thing she's ever experienced. Elle was pale and clammy, nothing like herself. "They didn't expect me to look so dreadful," she said. "They'd never seen me like that." Her parents remain somewhat traumatized by what they witnessed.

Sepsis kills 48,000 people in the UK each year. It's a serious reaction to infection that develops with terrifying speed, and it rarely announces itself clearly. The charity Sepsis Research notes that it often grows from infections that seem ordinary and manageable—a sore throat, a fever, something you'd normally ride out. For students especially, drowsiness, nausea, and exhaustion after a night out are easy to attribute to alcohol or lack of sleep or the kind of flu that moves through university halls every autumn. Elle's mistake was understandable. It was also nearly fatal.

She spent the next couple of weeks exhausted, and for months afterward she was tired in a way that seemed to have no bottom to it. But she recovered. She credits the speed of her hospital visit, the fact that she told staff she believed she had sepsis, and a medical team that acted without hesitation. "It's so different for everyone," she said, aware that her story had an ending, while many others don't.

Next year Elle will run the London Marathon for Sepsis Research. She's urging young people to take their symptoms seriously, to recognize that what feels like a hangover might be something far more dangerous. "It's not always a hangover," she said. "Sometimes it's something worse." The speed of sepsis is what haunts her—how quickly a sore throat became a life-threatening emergency, how close she came to waiting just one more day.