Amy Dowden almost died amid her cancer treatment after she developed "life-threatening side-effects".
Amy Dowden almost died amid her cancer treatment
The ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ pro dancer has been keeping her fans updated with her progress after being diagnosed with stage three breast cancer, which has included posting on Instagram about shaving her head, undergoing a mastectomy to up her chances of survival, and freezing embryos to increase her probability to being a mother afterwards - but she has suffered serious chemotherapy side effects, including blood clots, sepsis and low blood pressure.
The 33-year-old dancer told the Daily Mirror newspaper: “After both my first cycles, I developed the life-threatening side-effects that can come with chemo, so I had it all in the first month."
Amy doesn’t like to “dwell” on the negatives and is supported by her husband Ben Jones, who she married last year.
At first she “felt great” after beginning her treatment, but she eventually needed hospital treatment after collapsing.
She said: “I had a temperature and didn’t realise the severity of having a temperature.
"I stood up, collapsed, Mum rang the emergency number and they said ‘phone an ambulance immediately’. From there everything got very serious.
“I remember going into hospital and them telling me I had an infection, but the following day it got very bad, I was unresponsive to antibiotics for hours.
"My last memory is a load of doctors around me in the early hours of Sunday morning. On Monday, a nurse explained I had gone into septic shock. They said my blood pressure was that low my vital organs would have started failing.”
Amy cannot remember much from her time in hospital, but insisted her health was in a “dangerous” place.
She said: “I had severely low blood pressure, a low heart rate, I wasn’t passing urine for 14 hours, my infection markers were at dangerous levels. I had three different types of antibiotics, and I finally responded to the third type.”
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