2023-09-03 14:00:34
Mark Oakes was diagnosed with sepsis
Mark Oakes celebrates life at 51 years old. The former British bodybuilder feels grateful, especially to his family, for having been through one of the most difficult moments in his life when he was diagnosed with sepsis in the middle of last year and his life was hanging by a thread. .
“I didn’t know anything about sepsis. She had a perception that it was something found in people who had gotten tattoos in unhygienic places or in someone who had suffered a horrible bite in a tropical country. I also thought it would be easy to treat, but I didn’t know that it kills about 50,000 of the 250,000 people affected in the UK every year. I didn’t know that it is the main cause of death worldwide”, acknowledged the former winner of the World Professional Bodybuilding Championship in 2013, in dialogue with Essexlive.
Oakes’ story began in July 2022, when he returned home from a bike ride through the woods. Already in his home, he began to clean the windows and it was at that moment that he felt his shoulder make a click that he did not care about, thinking that it could be a bad move.
Hours later, however, he could no longer move his arm. She took an anti-inflammatory and went to bed. The next day he began to have a fever and tremors in his body, so he decided to go to Princess Alexandra Hospital to be examined. The ER doctor saw him and referred him to an orthopedist when he saw that his shoulder was immobilized.
Mark was a 2013 bodybuilding champion (IG/natural_oak)
The following week was an ordeal for Mark. While trying to ease the pain with painkillers, he worried about not being able to go to the bathroom for those seven days, as well as having difficulty sleeping and breathing.
Seeing that something was wrong, he decided to measure his blood oxygen using his wife Heather’s smartwatch and was surprised with the result: it was 68%, when healthy is between 95 and 100. Noticing that, he went back to the medical center and was referred for surgery to drain his shoulder. But while he was unconscious from the general anesthesia, his liver and kidneys began to fail, at the same time that his lungs began to fill with fluid.
It was then that the professionals decided to keep him anesthetized and send him to the Intensive Care Units (ICU). Mark woke up 17 hours later in a hospital bed with an oxygen mask on his face and a doctor diagnosed him with sepsis.
The charity Sepsisresearch.org.uk, with whom he works closely today, reports that the condition occurs “when the immune system overreacts and begins to attack not only the infection, but everything around it, including the body’s own tissues and organs.” . Any type of infection (bacterial, viral or fungal) can cause sepsis. At the same time, he details that “it is the main preventable cause of death in the world. It is a deadly condition that can kill a previously healthy adult in a matter of hours.”
The former bodybuilder and karate fighter (black belt) spent 10 days in the ICU without showing any improvement. “It must have been very hard for Heather (his wife) when the doctors told her that the infection was getting stronger than me, and that she should consider bringing Lincoln (their common son) to say goodbye to me,” he recalled.
“I had a very strong feeling of ‘I have to survive… my son and my family need me.’ I want Lincoln to get to know me as he gets older.” The seven-year-old knew that his father was not well, but he never knew what he was really dealing with. “Heather worked exceptionally hard to keep her life as normal as possible, as well as visiting me. She has had the toughest journey of all of us, hands down,” he acknowledged.
Mark and his son practiced karate together (IG / natural_oak)
Fortunately the treatment began to give good results, Mark’s health began to slowly reestablish itself and it was when he stabilized that Lincoln visited him for the first time.
Shoulder problems and body fatigue persisted as a result of the disease, but after 20 days in which he visited different hospitals to undergo studies and various medications, he was discharged. Along the way he had suffered from septic arthritis and septic shock to the body. He also had to undergo two surgeries in September and December 2022, and a third in April 2023.
Through his Instagram account, he recently announced that he will star in what he hopes will be “the fourth and last surgery after 12 months and many antibiotics. Hopefully it will be the end of this.” “Did you know that September is Sepsis Awareness Month? If it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone, ”she declared in the last post on her social network.
As he navigates what could be his last steps from the disease, Mark Oakes continues to serve as Vice President and Chief Judge of the UKDFBA, a bodybuilding association in which he competed for many years before retiring. At the same time, he also collaborates with the organization Sepsis Research FEAT, with the goal of raising awareness about the condition, as well as providing funding for related research.
Mark tries to raise awareness among his followers through his Instagram account (IG / natural_oak)
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