JENNIFER GAVIN – surviving sepsis – Runner’s World, Aug 2026 issue
On one of Jennifer Gavin’s longer training runs for this year’s London Marathon, she finished at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. There was nothing wrong with her. ‘I wanted to show myself that I was in there, and now, 18 months later, I’m out here, and I’m strong, and I can do this,’ she says.
Jennifer, a change manager from Greenock near Glasgow, isn’t really a runner. This year’s Marathon was her first race at any distance. Strictly speaking this article should be appearing in Netballer’s World magazine, as she’s a qualified netball coach who teaches primary school kids and has had spells of playing up to five times a week in the Goal Attack position. But she was moved to take on London to raise money and awareness for the charity Sepsis Research (FEAT) after her own experience of the condition almost ended her life in 2024. Then she’ll tackle the Porto Half Marathon, which in a bleak example of stars aligning takes place on September 13th. That’s both World Sepsis Day and what she calls ‘my anniversary’ – the date she fell ill in Portugal’s second city.
Sepsis happens when the body reacts incorrectly to an infection and starts to attack tissues and organs. Because the infections can be different and it can manifest with some of a wide range of different symptoms, it is notoriously difficult to diagnose until it is too late. The charity highlights the shocking statistic that sepsis kills more people than breast, bowel, and prostate cancer combined.
Jennifer’s experience shows how easy it is to pass sepsis off as something less serious. When she landed in Porto to celebrate her 31st birthday with a minibreak with her sister, she had a sore throat and aches all over her body. Because her mum had been hospitalised with sepsis in 2018, sepsis symptoms were one of the things she googled while in Portugal, but even then, she thought she just had flu.
‘You gaslight yourself, because the chances of it being sepsis are so low compared to it being the flu,’ she says. ‘I was the fittest I’d ever been, I wasn’t drinking much alcohol. I could still urinate, and not being able to is one of the main symptoms, as your kidneys can shut down. But as I now know, not everyone gets the same symptoms.’
Abi Dawson from Sepsis Research (FEAT) explains further: ‘It starts with a source infection of some kind, which could be bacterial, viral or fungal. Because there is no specific treatment for sepsis, you need to treat the source infection, and for some patients it’s very clear what that is, while for others, the medics are confronted with a situation where there is a systemic inflammatory response in the body, but they don’t know where to start to target it.’
Jennfer spent the whole of her Porto weekend inside the AirBNB, and somehow got home before seeing her first medical professional back in England. ‘I can’t even remember getting home. I don’t know how I was even allowed on the flight,’ she says. The GP found that her heart rate and temperature were both very high, but sent her home to rest, again citing flu symptoms. ‘Even for the best trained medics, it’s really hard to identify that point where the body tips from a standard infection into sepsis,’ says Abi Dawson.
Three days after the GP visit, she dialled 111. ‘I wasn’t getting better, it had been a week and I was still really bad. I still had a fever and could hear my heart pounding in my ears. The operator told me to go to hospital, and when I got there, the doctor told me that if I hadn’t come in that night, I probably would have died in my sleep.’
She understandably becomes tearful talking about this. ‘I just feel very lucky because I know there are people who were exactly the same as me, who made a different choice, went to bed and aren’t here any more. I really carry that with me,’ she says. ‘But I am also proud that I advocated for myself and took myself to the hospital and kept telling them I was getting worse. What I want to get across is that people should trust their instincts and if you’re not getting better, get seen as soon as possible.’
In the hospital she had to be put into an induced coma for six days. It was only on day three of that experience that the doctors were finally able to identify the infection and begin treating it: a nasty bug called Fusobacterium necrophorum which had caused abscesses in her lungs and severe pneumonia.
She was off work for three more months and finally began to feel more normal around January 2025, before a further less serious bout of sepsis in May last year. This time it was identified more quickly.
Having at one point been unable to walk from her sofa to her fridge without her heart rate hitting 150, it seems her illness hasn’t affected her ability to run. For netball training she always did sprints and Pilates, which has helped. And she thinks her sepsis experience has given her the mental strength to persist with her long runs. ‘I feel like I’m now so mentally strong from going through that, that’s really helped with my endurance,’ she says. ‘I still say I’m not a runner, and I am looking forward to waking up without being threatened by the Runna app about how far I need to run each day. I’d love to just got for a run and see how far I can go, and when I want to stop, I’ll stop. But I do get the runner’s high. I can’t believe that the same lungs that were on a ventilator can power me to do this.’
Donate to Jennifer’s charity page for Sepsis Research (FEAT) at https://2026tcslondonmarathon.enthuse.com/pf/jennifer-gavin
