An Angus woman will unveil her degree show just six weeks after she almost died of sepsis.
Amy Crawford, 22, from Carnoustie, said she was determined that the debilitating condition wasn’t going to ruin several years of hard work.
Amy, who studies Fine Art at Dundee University’s Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, was in such severe pain that she was unable to stand by the time she arrived at the out-of-hours doctor service in Dundee at the start of April.
Dr Anjali Patil immediately diagnosed Amy with suspected sepsis and she was taken by ambulance to Ninewells Hospital for an emergency life-saving operation with a pulse rate of 146 and a temperature of 39.9 degrees.
Surgeons successfully removed a large internal abscess from her body — which was turning septic — before it could rupture and burst.
Despite her ordeal, Amy said her thoughts turned to her work and the possibility of missing her degree show as she lay in her hospital bed.
“It was as I was lying waiting for my operation that I had a brief moment when I started thinking that I wouldn’t get to my degree show and I would have wasted all that time and effort,” she said.
“I would have been devastated to have missed out.
“This is what everything builds toward for art students and even after the operation I was worrying about what needed to be done.
“All my tutors and other staff here were fantastic though.
“They kept emailing me to let me know what stage everything was at and put my mind at rest as much as they could.”
The last few months of their undergraduate years are the busiest for students as they work days, nights and weekends to pull the strands of their final-year project together, hand in their dissertation and put the finishing touches to their degree show exhibits.
As such, Amy’s illness came at the worst possible time.
She said: “I was so weak but I knew I had to get into university to finish my work.
“I started off coming in a couple of days a week and built up from there.
“I probably shouldn’t have come in as much as I did but I had put so much into this that I was determined that sepsis wasn’t going to ruin it for me.
“We had already handed in our dissertations and, luckily, I am quite an organised person so everything that needed to be done related to the actual assembly and installation.
“If I had one piece of advice for art students it is to be as organised as possible because you never know what’s round the corner.
“It was frustrating for me to be sitting at home recovering knowing how much needed to be done but, once again, people couldn’t have been more supportive when I came back in.
“I had a great third-year student helping me out.
“I have been looking forward to this day for four years and I guess everything that’s happened will make it even better.”
Amy’s exhibit is inspired by her experiences running art workshops for adults with dementia, aiming to challenge common perceptions of sufferers and aspiring to inject humanity into the issue by seeing past the disease itself.
The exhibition opens with the traditional preview evening for the students, their families and invited guests on Friday and will open to the public the following day.
Admission is free and the show if open until May 28.
