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”.
Amy Dowden and McFly’s Tom Fletcher on Strictly Come Dancing. Pic: BBC/Guy Levy
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.”
EastEnders star James Bye and Amy Dowden on Strictly Come Dancing in 2022
But she quickly deteriorated. Her mother Gillian said: “Amy’s symptoms