Danielle Penman could have lost her life days after giving birth to her baby girl as a deadly sepsis infection overwhelmed her body.
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Ms Penman had an episiotomy after an induced labour but hours after being stitched up, her pain was excruciating.
Surgery hours later found a massive haematoma.
But days after the surgery she developed symptoms of sepsis, such as a fever, inability to pass urine and pain.
But she said the question of whether she was experiencing sepsis was never asked and her concerns about not passing urine were dismissed.
Ms Penman was sent home but the same day she had a massive bleed and was taken back to hospital.
She told a doctor she was unable to pass urine and he found 750ml of urine trapped in her bladder.
"I said 'please take my temperature again because I know that I've got some sort of infection'," she told AAP.
Doctors discovered her high temperature and that she was experiencing life-threatening sepsis.
"It's lucky that I had the bleed and went back to the hospital and they caught the sepsis before anything bad happened," Ms Penman said.
The source of her sepsis was never identified.
Ms Penman is among the 55,000 Australians who develop sepsis every year, with 8000 people dying from complications of the disease.
Not only can it be deadly but survivors can lose limbs and suffer post-traumatic stress disorder.
Sepsis can be caused by E.coli bacteria that spreads through the body.
Research has found why a certain type of E.coli can cause such serious disease when other E.coli bacteria can exist harmlessly in the body.
Researchers from the University of Queensland found "bad" E.coli has a mutation where it does not develop cellulose.
Cellulose acts like a cloak for bacteria making it harmless to the body.
Without the cloak of cellulose, the harmful factors of E.coli are exposed which then stimulate the immune response of inflammation in the body, breaking down the intestinal wall to travel into the bloodstream spreading infection.
By finding the difference between the good and bad bacteria in our gut, researchers hope it will lead to more targeted antibiotics and strengthen the fight against antibiotic resistance.
"We've got more understanding of a mechanism that we can disrupt or we can target with our antibiotics, and try and make sure that we're limiting the effect of antibiotics against bad bacteria as opposed the bacteria doing good in our bodies," Professor Mark Schembri said.
Prof Schembri said sepsis was a major concern in Australia particularly the growing rate of antibiotic resistance to the disease.
"The number of deaths from these infections is rising and will continue to arise unless we do something about it," he said.
Ms Penman welcomed the research breakthrough.
"It's critical work. Because with sepsis if the antibiotics don't work you're gone basically," she said.
Australian Associated Press
