Craig McKinley in St. Thomas' Hospital after surgery. He says he owes his life to the NHS
The night before Craig McKinley had all his limbs amputated, he recorded a farewell video of his legs and arms from his hospital bed. “The Grim Reaper let me live,” he says, looking into the camera his wife is holding, “but he got his toll with four of my limbs.”
September 28, 2023 Mr. McKinley, Member Conservative MP for South Thanet went into septic shock. His kidneys and liver hardened and blood clots began to form in his limbs. His limbs turned black, his toes and fingers became, in his words, “withered,” and then curled up as if they belonged to a “mummified pharaoh” or a “peat bog.”
Mr. McKinley taps his cell phone in front of him and explains that “my feet have become as hard as your phone.” Being a realist, he knew that his limbs were not for salvation. When surgeons told the 57-year-old they would have to perform a quadruple amputation, he was “stoic.”
The local hospital in Kent, which saved Mr McKinley's life, told him he was the sickest patient they had seen all year. His wife Katya was ordered to be prepared for his death; her husband's chances of survival were at best 5 percent.
Mr. McKinley before his amputations. “Over time,” he says, “The right leg just folded inward.” Just dead things attached to it'
Eight months later, Mr McKinley sits on the sofa in his Georgian mansion in the pretty town of Kent, wearing a shirt and trousers, the thin black metal of his artificial legs barely visible in the gaps between his trousers and his shoes where his ankles should be. There are scars around the mouth and nose; and a small part of his right ear is missing.
The arms — or lack thereof — are more obvious. In their place stand two hard rubber tree stumps, which he admits look medieval. “They're good for fighting and breaking windows, but that's about it,” he says.
Mr. McKinley said his initial replacement hands were «good for fighting and breaking windows, but not much else»; Photo: Eddie Mulholland for the Telegraph
The replacement multi-function hands, which will cost him £100,000 through a private company, went through a trial installation on Monday, just in time for his remarkable return to public life.
He revealed BBC that his prosthetic arms are “amazing… but they will never be the same.
“So yes, hands are a real loss.”
Mr. McKinley is getting used to his new prosthetic arms. Photo: BBC 
Photo: BBC
On Wednesday Mr McKinley will make his first trip back to Westminster in time for the Prime Minister . Mrs McKinlay and Olivia, their four-year-old daughter who turns five on Thursday, will watch proudly from the public gallery.
Craig McKinley is a walking miracle born of optimism and fighting spirit. Only half a dozen people a year in the UK who have to have all four limbs amputated at the same time actually survive.
“I was lucky,” Mr. McKinley says. “I have knees and elbows and that makes a big difference.” For that he can thank Mrs. McKinley, 44, to whom he has been married for 12 years. First, she fought to get him to the hospital — the paramedics didn't want to admit him. She sought a second opinion when the local hospital, seeing the spread of dead tissue, wanted to amputate his arms at the armpit and his legs at the groin to ensure his survival.
“They told me to prepare for the worst,” says Katie McKinley. “But I never left the hospital after saying goodbye.” I didn't want to accept it.»
Craig and Katie McKinley, married for 12 years, their daughter Olivia
Back in September 2023, the day before McKinley's life was turned upside down, there was nothing untoward that foreshadowed the horrors to come. Parliament was in recess and Mr McKinley decided to skip the annual Conservative conference in favor of a rare family holiday in Turkey. Their bags were packed and Mr McKinley went to bed earlier than usual.
“I felt a little unwell during the day, a little off color and we had an early flight to catch the next day anyway.” , he says. However, at night he “felt very ill,” and “in the morning I felt worse.”
If he had gotten sick on the plane or made it to Turkey, Mr. McKinley would never have been able to do it. There are many times in his history when even the smallest things went wrong.
«There is no doubt that Katie saved my life.»
Ms. McKinley, a pharmacist in a family of doctors, was alarmed enough to call an ambulance that arrived “in a reasonable time.” She tried to take her husband's pulse, but could not find it. Mr. McKinley's hands turned white. It was already 8.30 am.
“The doctors didn’t want to see me. They thought I should go see my GP. I could go back to sleep. And I probably would have died,” Mr. McKinley recalls. But Mrs McKinley intervened and insisted that her husband be transferred to Medway Naval Hospital, the largest general hospital in Kent. The ambulance crew could not detect any obvious signs of concern other than low blood sugar, which they thought could be a symptom of undiagnosed diabetes.
«After some objections, they agreed [to take me],» Mr. McKinley recalls. “There is no doubt that Katie saved my life. If we had gotten there two hours later, I would have been dead.” He describes this time as “Goldilocks time.” If the ambulance had arrived earlier, he would not have gone to the hospital at all; a little later would have been… well… too late.
A deputy with his family before and immediately after sepsis. His wife Katie fought to get him to hospital last September
By 10am — just over an hour after he was admitted to hospital — his condition had changed dramatically. “I was in triage and I was fine and conscious,” he says, “and then I literally turned blue when the sepsis shock set in.”
He later learned that it was an effect of disseminated intravascular coagulation, a condition that refers to disseminated intravascular coagulation and can be caused by sepsis. DIC causes blood to clot, blocking blood flow to many parts of the body, including vital organs and limbs. It may also cause bleeding.
“They [at the hospital] realized that something was seriously wrong. I was taken away very quickly, under anesthesia, a ventilator and everything else. That’s the last thing I remember,” he says. “So I was in an induced coma for 16 days and had severe organ failure. Dialysis, liver problems. «My wife was told, 'He's one of the sickest people we've ever seen in the hospital,' and she was preparing for the worst.» By comparison, Medway treats around 400,000 patients each year.
“The strange thing is that sepsis usually takes a few days to develop. Usually you feel worse and worse, and if you notice this, you will save yourself. But everything happened so quickly and so seriously for me that there wasn’t even any warning.”
The hospital offered a very radical operation
While Mr. McKinley was in a coma and unaware of the behind-the-scenes arguments, Mrs. McKinley fought for his side. “Medway was proposing a very, very radical operation,” he says, “to here and there.” Mr. McKinley shows me where the surgeons wanted to amputate before explaining it: «To the crotch and to the armpits.»
All he can remember about his time in Medway are a few strange dreams while he was in a coma. In one of them, he was the king of Gibraltar, who sank the Iranian fleet supplied by the French. (It's worth noting that Mr McKinley's colorful political past includes helping to found Ukip in the mid-1990s, becoming its interim leader, and then defecting to the Conservative Party and then defeating Nigel Farage in South Thanet in the 2015 election and becoming the party's first MP four years later, a jury acquitted him of deliberate election fraud.)
Craig McKinley defeated Nigel Farage (left) in South Thanet in the 2015 election. Photo: GARETH FULLER/PA
Mrs McKinley, wanting a second opinion, contacted St Thomas' Hospital in London, just a few hundred yards from the Palace of Westminster. on the other side of the Thames. The specialists present agreed to accept her husband.
“I couldn't be transported immediately because my platelet count was so low that if I had internal bleeding, I would have died of bleeding, so I had to wait a little while.”
October 16 McKinley was transferred to the intensive care unit at St Thomas' Hospital — «I was conscious, but the mixture of drugs means I don't really remember» — and 10 days later he was transferred to the intensive care unit (HDU).
The Waiting Game
St Thomas' Hospital surgeon Edmund Fitzgerald O'Connor decided to bide his time. “He wanted to see how my arms and legs developed because by then they were black, like plastic. I guess it's most similar to… — Mr. McKinley pauses, searching for a suitable comparison. Finally he says, “Frostbite, severe frostbite. You have lost circulation. It went into your arms and legs. It's like your phone. They were as difficult as your phone. Like plastic up to the elbows and halfway up the knees. The surgeon said, «Let's see what's dead and what's not, because we want to preserve as much length as possible.»
For the next six weeks he lay in the HDU, with Mrs. McKinley visiting him every day. Her parents flew in from Hungary to look after Olivia as soon as Mr. McKinley was admitted to the hospital.
On December 1, surgeons performed a quadruple amputation within five hours. “They did it all in one blow, in one day. Now, during this month, I could see that these limbs were ready. The blackness increased, and the fingers resembled a man from a peat bog. Or some pharaoh dug up in the desert. They were all dried out, compressed and drying. They are part of you, but they are not like you. Like a pharaoh's finger that gets smaller and drier every day. My legs gradually became worse. Over time, my right leg simply turned inward. Just a dead thing attached to it.»
«I'm surprisingly at peace with it.»
During November, Mr. McKinley says he has a “fairly regular fever,” and adds, with some understatement, “because you have this gangrenous stuff sinking down your whole body a little bit. I was constantly on a cocktail of antibiotics as your arms and legs wither and die. Or dead.”
Despite the drugs, he was well aware of the likely outcome. “My wife has always been full of hope. She'd look at my limbs and say, «Oh, there's a little pink there, we could save some money,» but I'd say, «They're done, they're done.» I was pretty stoic about it. Whether it was a cocktail of drugs that gives you a happier outlook on life, I don't know, but I saw it all going to nothing but a very bad outcome. Looking back, I was surprisingly at peace with it. There was no option.”
On the eve of the amputations, Ms McKinley recorded a video which the family shared with The Telegraph. This is a painful and extremely unpleasant sight. The picture shows Mr McKinley lying in a hospital bed with a tube running from his nose and his arms and legs blackened.
“The reality is that I probably shouldn’t have lived this far because the damage this sepsis did was so serious,” he says, looking into the camera. “You don't often see people in my condition survive, so it's a big thank you for what they did to keep me alive. This resulted in the complete death of my arms and legs.
“The reason I'm making this video today is of course the last time these old things that have served me well for 57 years will be attached to me. They are gnarled, dry and parched. It will be like saying goodbye to old friends.
“Tomorrow we will begin the real rehabilitation when these useless hands are gone, as sad as it is to see them go. It will be a new life, a different life. The Grim Reaper let me live, but he got his due with my four limbs.”
“I'm not as sad about this as you might expect.”
Five months after his amputation, Mr. McKinley is in a reflective mood. “It wasn't as terribly shocking as you might think. I could see it myself. People can't believe how funny I was. I don't have much to be happy about, but that's my nature. There's not much you can do about it, so there's little point in getting upset about it.
“You come to and because of the general anesthesia you think that no time has passed and they couldn’t have done it. I looked at this missing limb and realized, yes, they did it.
“It wasn't a surprise, and I wasn't as upset about it as you might expect. I lay in a hospital bed for over a month and you knew it was just a matter of time before it happened. I was very sick and carried around gangrenous dead flesh causing general infections. I just didn’t feel good at all.”
At Westminster, amputations were kept a closely guarded secret. Back in December, just over two weeks after his surgery, Mr McKinley sent out an open letter to constituents apologizing for not being in touch for «some time» and adding by way of explanation that he had suffered from sepsis and what he experienced. as a result, it is called «extreme surgery». He did not specify.
Deputy with Katie and Olivia after surgery
The cause of sepsis remains unclear. The test, carried out by a specialist laboratory in Manchester, detected pneumococcus, the bacteria that causes pneumonia. “That’s the only way they can explain it [sepsis]. Sepsis is your body going crazy. This is an autoimmune reaction going overboard. It's not the disease, but your body's overreaction to it. This causes the platelets to explode and form blood clots, and it is the blood clots that cause blockages in your arms, legs and limbs.»
Mr. McKinley is eventually relieved. St. Thomas' Hospital agreed to admit him. “Thank heavens. I'm lucky. I have knees and elbows, and that makes a big difference.”
The December 1 amputation wasn't quite the beginning. He had previously undergone a procedure called debridement to remove dead skin from his face, which left scars above his mouth and nose and a small part of his right ear is now missing. Before this interview begins, Ms. McKinley applies lip balm to ease the discomfort of dry skin around her mouth.
Mr McKinley has been given general anesthesia 11 times in total since September last year and has undergone a number of procedures. On Jan. 6, surgeons removed a “very large tumor” from the top of his thigh and transplanted it into his left arm, where there was too much dead tissue and not enough living skin to preserve bone. There was a distinct fear that the entire arm might have to be removed. The procedure took 11 hours. For the next week he had to «lay completely still» with a «bear hug» system wrapped around his injured arm to keep it warm.
On December 27, he was transferred from HDU to a specialist surgical unit. with loss of limbs. On January 15, the deputy received a plaster cast on his left leg. His right leg still had complications from scarring from sepsis, which made him look like a burn victim. “I have a photo of my leg and it looks like a doner kebab,” Mr. McKinley says. “She was in terrible condition.”
The right prosthesis arrived at the end of January. “I left St. Thomas on February 20th on my feet with a frame. But in a vertical position. It wasn't bad. Mrs. McKinley, filming her first exit from the hospital room on home video, is so jubilant that you can hear her applauding and her pride for her husband as he makes his way through the door.
For the next three months, Mr McKinley's home was the 12-bed specialist amputee unit run by St Thomas' Hospital in south London. The MP was “going under his own steam” in just over a week and just 88 days after having his limbs removed. “I took my first 30 steps without a frame or a crutch, and they were very surprised,” he says. But everything was not so simple. He acknowledges the ups and downs, particularly the skin that constantly cracks on his legs.
Friends from parliament came. Rishi Sunak and his predecessors as Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Liz Truss paid him visits. A European research group made up of Tory Eurosceptics even held a meeting at his bedside. Among those present were Sir Iain Duncan Smith, Mark Francois and Sir Bernard Jenkin. Constituency work resumed at his bedside. Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle was a regular guest. Mr. McKinley will run in the next election, unlike many of his colleagues who are leaving politics.
The rehabilitation hasn't been easy, but Mr McKinley is determined not to return to the wheelchair, which has been sitting in his living room unused for the past month. “It’s amazing how hard it is to walk,” he says. “These first [artificial limbs] don’t have movable ankles. Going up and down the stairs is really hard; the slopes are really difficult.” The NHS should provide new limbs with ankles.
“Arms,” he says, “are a different story. They [the National Health Service] won't pay for them. Multifunctional weapons will have to wait an indefinite amount of time. Maybe two years. If you want to return to normal life, you will have to buy them yourself.”
He raises his present hands. “This is what the NHS gives you and frankly I find it incredible, if not insulting, that in 2024 this is the best they can come up with. This could have been invented in the Middle Ages. William the Conqueror would have recognized them.» He laughs, but almost cries. “They're good for breaking windows or pub fights. I don’t see anything else.”
The next option provided by the NHS are 'hull-powered hooks', for which it gives a date of suitability of the mid-1800s. “It’s frustrating that multi-function devices are available, but you can’t have them.” For example, to brush his teeth, he removes his hands and holds the toothbrush between his stumps.
Mr McKinley will continue to campaign to make sure «sepsis takes root» so that «even if one person» notices it early «and doesn't go through with it, it will be a job well done». His second task is to try to improve the NHS service for people with multiple limb loss, which he says is «not equipped to deal with these kinds of complications». The physiotherapist told him there were around half a dozen similar cases in the UK every year. “There is a reason for this. Usually you die from this level of sepsis,” he says.
The system is «unfair» because insurance covers limbs lost in a car accident, for example, while the military and various charities will pay for veterans' care. . “But if you get sepsis, you're on your own. You depend on the National Health Service. You are at a disadvantage compared to people who have lost limbs for other reasons.”