When Deborah Haynes and her husband decided to take some time for themselves, they headed to Sark for a weekend away from work and the kids.
Mrs Haynes is the Security and Defence Editor at Sky News. Her work has taken her to some of the most remote places in the modern world, often plagued by war.
Sark seemed like the perfect destination to get away from life’s pressures, and one that holds a special place for her husband and their family too.
“My husband is from Jersey, and so his parents live in Jersey, and we go there every summer for summer holidays and often at Christmas time too,” Mrs Haynes explained.
“We had planned to go to Jersey, leave our three children with their grandparents, and then head off to Sark on our own, just the two of us, to spend a few days there.
“My husband had spent time on Sark as a child, and had very fond memories and often talked about the island, so I was really keen to go, and that was the plan. Unfortunately, it didn’t go to plan once we actually stepped on the ferry.”
Initially thinking she was feeling sea sick, Mrs Haynes gradually became more ill as she continued to settle on the world’s first Dark Sky Island.
“We went and dropped our bags at the hotel. We decided to go for a swim at Dixcart Bay, which is just sort of near to the hotel where we were staying, and it was when I went into the sea actually, that my body really started to break,” she recalled.
“I’d lost the ability to control my body temperature, and so I was really cold. I remember just shivering. I came out of the sea shivering, getting increasingly sick, wanting to kind of keel over.
“I really needed to get back to the hotel, and it was on the path back up to the hotel that I just started being violently sick, and it was so sudden that we thought maybe it was food poisoning.”
Mrs Haynes has an ultra-rare disease called aHUS. It had only reared its head once before and that was eight years prior, so it wasn’t an immediate obvious option for why she taken so ill so suddenly.
aHUS is a life-threatening disease where a faulty part of the immune system becomes overactive.
It mistakenly attacks and destroys the body’s own blood cells and small vessels, causing widespread clots. This rapidly leads to acute kidney failure, and can damage other vital organs.
It’s imperative that should someone with aHUS feel like an attack is starting, that they get the necessary treatments as soon as possible.
After arriving back at the hotel, Mrs Haynes was feeling steadily worse, and soon, her husband brought up the possibility that it could have been an aHUS attack.
She queried whether or not Sark’s shop would stock a urine test, to try to figure out if it was an instance of aHUS, but knowing the island well, her husband decided to get help instead.
“He was the one that decided he would try and find Sark’s only GP. I can remember being like, ‘Oh no, don’t be silly’, but it was actually my husband’s decision to do that.
“That really did either save my life, or at the very least, save me from further, very serious damage.
“He went to find Dr Bruce Jenkins, who was absolutely amazing. The doctor did the test and immediately saw that the protein levels in my urine were way off the charts. He immediately said to my husband, you need to go back to the hotel, pack your bags. I’ll do the rest.”
Dr Bruce Jenkins sounded the alarm and put the wheels in motion to get Mrs Haynes the help she needed, and as soon as that alarm had gone out, help was on the way.
Harry Rauser, a member of Sark’s Volunteer Rescue team, was the first on the scene,
“You wouldn’t think that response times are relatively good, I would say actually, given the circumstances, we’re typically on the scene inside of five to 10 minutes, that’s much better than many would expect,” he said.
“There’s also a very well organised transfer system, if need be, so people can be forwarded to Guernsey, or to the UK from Guernsey.”
He puts the success of the volunteer team’s operations down to the medical professionals who provide training, and the confidence it gives them to help a casualty.
“We are all volunteers, which is quite different to how things are run in Guernsey, Jersey, or the UK.
“We are included with roughly a dozen other people who are volunteers, but we do get regular training.
“Once a month, we get updates and professional training by our fantastic nurse who basically founded the whole volunteer team a couple of years ago. She’s called Holly, and she’s the heart and soul of the endeavour, and thanks to her assets and everything she does in terms of education, we’re very well prepared.”
Due to Sark’s ban on motorised vehicles, there isn’t a regular ambulance, so Mrs Haynes’ emergency evacuation involved a tractor-towed cart, a marine ambulance, a medical plane, and a conventional ambulance which all took her from Sark to the University College Hospital in London within 11 hours, with time spent at Guernsey’s Princess Elizabeth Hospital on the way.
When she arrived in London, expert medical teams, including Professor Marie Scully, administered the life-saving drug eculizumab, leading to Mrs Haynes’ eventual recovery.
Jim Martin, another member of the Dark Sky Island’s Volunteer Rescue Team, said it shows how far the community will go to help someone in need.
“We work well as a community,” he said. “You know, we are only a small island. We’re a small community, a small people, but a mighty people.
“Whenever the chips are down for others, we do get together, and we know what has to be done, and we just go for it and do it.”
Mrs Haynes received the life saving treatment that she needed thanks to the endeavours of each member of the rescue teams, volunteers, and medical specialists.
Even for a journalist of Mrs Haynes calibre, it’s difficult to make that kind of gratuity tangible.
“Words aren’t enough to express the gratitude that I feel for what they did for me. Speaking out about this, it’s a very personal thing, and I’m a journalist by trade, and I don’t like to be the story, I like to be reporting the story.
“The reason to report about what happened is primarily to raise awareness about this disease, because knowledge is key, and speedy diagnosis is so vital, but also really, to say a massive thank you to the incredible volunteers, Dr Jenkins on SARK, and then the amazing team at UCH, led by Professor Marie Scully, and then the incredible medics, the doctors and the nurses on the intensive care unit at UCH, who really did save me.”
Mrs Haynes is expected to make a full recovery thanks to the speed of the rescue, and the expert knowledge at hand.
LISTEN:
You can hear more from Mrs Haynes, and the Sark Volunteer Rescue Team’s members, through our podcast below.