A Tory MP has told how his hands and feet were amputated after he contracted sepsis.
Craig Mackinlay said he was put into an induced coma and given just a 5% chance of survival following his diagnosis in September last year.
The South Thanet MP, who will return to parliament today for the first time since falling ill, told the BBC he regained consciousness to discover his limbs were completely black.
“You could almost knock them,” he said. “They were black, desiccating, clenched”.
“They managed to save above the elbows and above the knees. So you might say I’m lucky.”
He now has prosthetic hands and feet and says he wants to be known as “the bionic MP”.
Mackinlay said he began to feel unwell while at work on September 27 last year, and woke up sick in the middle of the night.
He was admitted to hospital the following morning, by which time he had begun to turn “a very strange blue” as his body went into septic shock.
After being in a coma for 16 days, the MP regained consciousness to discover his limbs “had turned black - you could almost knock them”.
His hands and feet were amputated on December 1 and he spent a “sombre” Christmas with his wife, Kati, and four-year-old daughter, Olivia.
After having prosthetic limbs fitted, Mackinlay took his first steps unaided on February 28.
The sepsis has also left him with some facial scarring and the MP said he was “trying to grow a goatee to cover it”.
Unsurprisingly, he admits to “low moments”.
“You do get a little one every morning because you’re in the land of nod having a nice dream, and then you wake up and it’s ‘I haven’t got any hands’,” he said.
“That is the realisation every morning.
“It’s very easy to say - and I do try and stick to it - there’s not much point moaning and complaining or getting down about the things you can’t do.
“You’ve got to be cheerful and positive about things you can do and I find every day there’s something new that I can do.
“None of this would be possible without my wife… I wouldn’t be where I am today without her.
″[MPs] probably spend too much time in Westminster, away from our families, chasing this, that and the other.
“You now realise the important things are family, friends, children.”