Man loses arm after being bitten by family's golden retriever puppy

Michael Cole spent two weeks on life support and had six operations in total after developing sepsis

Michael Cole was bitten on the hand by his puppy (Facebook)

A Dorset man has lost his arm after a small bite on his hand from a family puppy led to sepsis.

Michael Cole, a business manager at an investment bank, fell “furiously ill” in the days following the bite from his family’s three-month-old golden retriever, named Harley, resulting in his right arm being amputated above his elbow.

Speaking to The Independent, the father-of-one said that before the sepsis was discovered he had become so ill that he could not stand or leave his bed, while his arm had swollen to the point that he could not move it.

On 9 November last year Mr Cole he had developed a serious fever and was becoming delirious, causing his wife Ffyona to call his local GP at 8.30am.

The family requested a doctor, but claim they were instead advised to give Mr Cole anti-sickness pills during phone triage with a nurse.

“My wife went to the chemist and got the prescription, but the pills made absolutely no difference as I was furiously ill,” he said.

“When my wife called NHS 111 at 3pm because I was getting worse they immediately sent an ambulance due to my symptoms.”

He was taken to hospital in Bournemouth “where they spent two hours saving my life because my blood pressure was so low”, he added, before he was rushed to Poole hospital for an operation on the same day.

Mr Cole, who also suffers from diabetes and an auto-immune condition, spent two weeks in a coma and on life support in the hospital, where his family were twice told that he had no chance of survival.


 Mr Cole underwent six operations to fight the infection, including the amputation of his right arm 
 (Ffyona Cole)

“But I kept fighting,” he said.

He further developed necrotising fasciitis, the rare and serious bacterial infection often termed the “flesh-eating disease,” and underwent a total of six operations during a month-long period in hospital, one of which was to amputate his arm above his elbow.

“They basically had to cut me open to cut the stuff out,” Mr Cole said, explaining that he has been left with a six-inch long and three-inch wide hole in his right leg from the ordeal.

“It spreads around your body, I was lucky that it didn’t hammer any of my organs.”

More than 150,000 cases of sepsis occur in the UK each year. Mr Cole is speaking about his life-changing experience to raise awareness of the dangers of this potentially deadly infection and “stop anyone else having to go through what I did”.

Sepsis causes 44,000 deaths in the UK each year, more than the combined number of deaths from bowel, breast and prostate cancer, according to the UK Sepsis Trust. It can be treated by antibiotics at home however, if detected early enough, the NHS states.

Mr Cole said he should have been treated as a high-risk patient due to his diabetes and auto-immune condition, and is suing his GP surgery for alleged medical negligence for failing to diagnose the sepsis sooner.

“It didn’t have to be as bad as it was,” he said.