Septicaemia, sometimes known as blood poisoning, happens when an infection spreads through your bloodstream. Sepsis is an infection affecting the whole body, and strictly speaking refers to the way your body responds to this infection.
It might be true that “If a doctor suspects sepsis, you’ll be admitted to hospital immediately.” However the trouble is getting to see a doctor. The triage dept. at my GP told me it wasn’t urgent for me to see a doctor, and they made an appoint four days later. Fortunately my wife took me to an out-of-hours GP (organised through NHS 111) who called the A&E dept. ahead of time. The A&E dept. told my wife that it didn’t matter that they’d been called, I’d still have to wait 6 hours to be seen. I passed out on the A&E floor, my wife raised merry hell and an hour later I was on a trolly being seen to. I was later told by the hospital consultant that I was lucky to have survived.
Tens of thousands of people die in A&E who aren’t seen in a timely manner, according to publications by both the BMJ and the Royal College of Emergency Medicine.
I was sorry to hear of your problem and thankfully your wife had the sense to not be shunned off. The problem is today, as you have mentioned, when you ring or call you are told you will get a message from Triage. I got one when I had had a bad fall from about 6 ft (aged 80) and had cut my arm badly to wait and the nearest Chemist would contact me. That was around 9 am, It was 2 pm when the Chemist finally rang me. I explained the situation and she said “Oh you need antibiotics, we cannot give those to you, you need to refer back to your GP practice. I rang the GP Practice and informed them of this and within 5 mins she got me an appointment to see the GP. GHP was lovely said immediately I needed penicillin antibiotics. When I collected the prescription he told me that would deal with it. And that was that. I had lots of pain and bruises from the fall but was concerned more about my arm. I have had this trouble before when dealing with a dental practice I had been going to for 30 years. Dentist retired and another practice took over. All young dentists but I realised that they could not extract teeth. The dentist (a young woman) was banging upwards on my tooth, probably hoping it would fall out. No idea what to do and then informed me she could not remove it and I would need to find another dentist who could do it. Good to say my brother recommended his dentist, who actually is local. All the family have now signed up to him and he is what we call “The older properly trained Dentist, who is able to do everything, including surgery”. He took out a broken eye tooth out for me. So quickly, no pain, perfect. So glad I changed dentists to a proper practice. Good luck for the future.