Strictly’s Amy Dowden reveals sepsis battle during chemotherapy

Strictly Come Dancing professional Amy Dowden has revealed she contracted sepsis after her first round of chemotherapy earlier this month. 

The 33-year-old was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer in May and underwent a mastectomy.

In July, the dancer from Caerphilly, South Wales, told fans she had received a second diagnosis of “another type of cancer”.

The dancer, who has also presented a BBC documentary on her battle with Crohn’s disease, has now opened up about her ordeal with sepsis that happened just two days after starting chemotherapy.

“I wasn’t feeling too bad that day, just sick, but a couple of hours later I started having a temperature of 37.7C,” she told Hello! Magazine.

“At the time, I didn’t realise that having a temperature of 37.5C or above could be fatal for a chemo patient. I just thought it was my reaction to chemo, but as it turned out, I had already got an infection.”

Over the next day, she improved.

“The Strictly producers were checking in on me, and I was sending videos of me on my walk. I couldn’t believe how good I was feeling.”

But she quickly deteriorated. Her mother Gillian said: “Amy’s symptoms got worse very, very quickly. At one point she felt ok, then suddenly she felt very ill – it happened in an instant.”

“She went to stand, then just sort of crumpled back on to the settee.”

Amy added: “I felt freezing cold but I was all clammy and shaking. My mum and dad rang my red card [which provides the chemotherapy team’s contact details and current treatment information] and they said to hang up and ring the ambulance.”

She was rushed to hospital where she was treated in an intensive care unit (ICU) for sepsis and dangerously low pressure.

After changing the type of antibiotic, Amy recovered but her memory of the period remains hazy.

“The doctors and nurses were telling me I had sepsis and that it was life-threatening but I wasn’t taking it in. I didn’t become properly aware until later. I told my dad: ‘I’ve got sepsis’ and he said: ‘I know!’.”

She has since been able to continue with chemotherapy.

Sepsis is a life-threatening reaction to an infection which happens when someone’s immune system overreacts to an infection and starts to damage their body’s own tissues and organs.

Dowden, who married fellow professional dancer Ben Jones in July last year, previously said she had found a lump in her breast the day before she planned to go on her belated honeymoon this year.

She joined BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing in 2017, and has had celebrity partners including comedian Brian Conley, Red Dwarf’s Danny John-Jules and McFly’s Tom Fletcher.

According to reports, Dowden will not be partnered with a celebrity for the upcoming series of Strictly Come Dancing while she undergoes treatment.