Starfish and sepsis
Last week I was at a lecture on Dame Laura Knight when a woman I hadn’t seen for a while approached me and told me I’d saved her life. In June she’d visited a dentist and had an injection. The next day the side of her face had come up like a balloon, her skin was darkening, she had a terrible headache and felt very poorly indeed. Over the past seven or so years, most of my long suffering friends have heard me drone on about the story of Tom and Nicola Ray and what an amazing film I thought it could be - mostly in a shameless attempt to get them to invest in it - and this lady remembered a conversation from a dinner party a while back. So she dragged herself off to the local A&E where she was, indeed, diagnosed as having sepsis, was successfully treated and thankfully, restored to full health. Her belief was that had she not received my sales pitch, she would have probably taken two ibuprofen and gone to bed - and perhaps never had the chance to learn of Dame Knight and her wonderful circus paintings.
Of course it’s not me. It’s another example of the sliding doors syndrome that, over the course of this project, I’ve come to realise, lays at the heart of our relationship with sepsis. An ambulance turns right instead of left and a wrong hospital could be selected. Or the right one. A doctor sees one set of symptoms and saves a life, another comes to a different, equally valid but wrong, set of conclusions with disastrous consequences. It’s a lottery. That’s why the work of Ron Daniels and the UK Sepsis Trust is so important. They are trying to remove that chance element. Bring about a greater awareness of the signs - for both the public and the medical profession. And reduce that terrifying statistic of 44,000 Britons dying from sepsis every year.
Ron has a great visual metaphor for this tragedy - a Premiere league football stadium removed every year. Another struck me - 44 primary schools wiped out every twelve months. If either of those things were true - sepsis would be at the top of the nation’s medical concerns. And it should be, because, as I learned last week, death by sepsis could be reduced by the simple act of spreading knowledge about its symptons. The power is in our own hands and we all need to support the work of Ron and the UKST in anyway we can.
It was never my intention to make a film about sepsis. I knew nothing about it. In fact, for the first couple of years I worked on "Starfish”, I genuinely believed that Tom Ray, my subject, was one of very few people in the world that had suffered at the hands of this illness. And the extent of his suffering was probably unique. (Lol). No, what drew me to the story was their love story of a different kind, their search for the existence of a humanity beyond the physical - and the mental and emotional battles that they and their famiiy had to overcome as they reinvented themselves and negotiated their way along a dark road that they never believed they would never have to travel down.
Now I’ve come to realise that we, the film makers, stumbled into something far, far bigger than we foresaw. Something that is taking us from the parochial shores of Rutland Water to the far reaches of the planet - and it’s a very humbling experience.
If you can - go and see “Starfish” when it comes out on October 28th. The work of the creative team is outstanding and the performances by Jo Froggatt and Tom Riley amongst the most powerful and most moving that you will ever see. Ever.
I am so proud to have been a part of this amazing group of people; cast, crew, producers and subjects, who worked so hard with so few resources and achieved so much. And I am now equally proud to realise that we are part of something that could, with all our help, genuinely reduce the tragedy of sepsis.
Bil Clark