I was 148kg when I almost died from sepsis. Doctors told me it could come back any time and my weight was a risk factor. So I lost 50kg WITHOUT Ozempic – this is how I did it
Ree O’Reilly was used to waking up at all hours of the night.
The 44-year-old suffered from Type 2 diabetes, and needing to pee while she should have been fast asleep was par for the course with her illness.
But waking one night in February 2022, Ree didn’t quietly make her way to the bathroom like she usually did.
Her memories of what occurred next are hazy, but she’s pieced them together from various conversations with her family members.
‘I was standing at the end of the bed and was talking to my fiancé Bill, not making much sense,’ the mother-of-three from Stawell, Victoria tells Daily Mail Australia.
‘I went back to bed. Then, that morning, my daughter saw me come down the hallway bouncing off one wall into the other and stumbling into the dining table and chairs.’
Ree then told her children Adelie, 24, Tenzin, 21, and Violet, 17, that she needed to go to the bathroom and have a shower.
‘I don’t remember anything of those few moments but the kids told me that they helped me into the shower, and when they came to check on me, they found me at the bottom of the shower, incoherent. They had no idea what I was saying.’
Bill was already at work, but worried about his wife, had already told the children to call an ambulance if they had any concerns.
Ree was 148kg and suffering from Type 2 Diabetes when she woke up in the night behaving strangely
So they did.
But driving down a rural highway, an hour away from Ballarat Hospital, Ree almost lost her life.
‘I flatlined five times on the way – my heart gave out,’ she says.
‘They had to stop on the highway so another ambulance could come and help.’
Miraculously, Ree – who then weighed 148kg – was revived in the ambulance and made it to ICU.
The first thing Ree remembers is coming to in a hospital corridor. The second thing she recalls is the searing, burning agony in her right leg.
‘A nurse held a phone to my ear, and I heard her say Bill was on the phone and I just said, “My leg is on fire, my leg is on fire”. I had no idea what was happening,’ she recalls.
The pain in her right leg was caused by an infection that had developed into life-threatening sepsis and lymphedema.
Sepsis occurs when the immune system has a dangerous reaction to an infection. It causes extensive inflammation throughout the body which can lead to organ failure and even death.
Ree had struggled with her weight since the age of 16. She would skip breakfast, then eat chocolate and fried food all day
Doctors later told Ree that while her weight was not the cause of her sepsis, her poor health gave her a bigger chance of it coming back and her body not being able to fight the infection
The skin on her leg had become severely cracked and covered in necrosis blisters from the shin all the way down to her foot.
‘It was like someone put my leg on a rotisserie spit or a fire,’ she says.
‘That’s how bad it felt. It was burning from the inside out. I had no wounds, cuts or scratches on that leg before, so no one knows how I got it – there were never any answers as to how it was caused.
‘The wound care team said they’d never treated anything as severe as that. At one point my right leg was eight times the size of my left.’
Ree was later told her condition became critical quickly because she wasn’t aware of the initial infection and there were no other warning signs.
‘I found out later that doctors were considering amputating the leg, which I was so relieved didn’t happen.’
After two weeks in the ICU, Ree spent four months in hospital, confined to a bed.
Although doctors had managed to get the infection under control, there was the constant threat of the sepsis returning, which would quickly shut her organs down. Her kidneys in particular were still showing extremely poor function.
She was so fragile, she had to remain on oxygen as she underwent blood transfusions, iron infusions, and multiple rounds of antibiotics.
Defying doctor’s expectations, however, Ree managed to leave hospital with both legs, but the lymphedema left her in agonising pain, and her foot had so many deep, open wounds that she was unable to wear shoes or leave the house for six months.
Her wound was so severe that a nurse would come to her home every week for more than two months to change her dressings.
‘My leg was covered in thick pads that would be drenched in leaked lymphatic fluid by the end of the day,’ she says.
Ree opted to go it alone, rather than use an appetite suppressant drug, and shed 50kg
Ree and her fiancé Bill now go on active holidays. He has lost 27kg himself following the same regime
Ree’s foot and leg is still scarred from the horrific damage caused by the sepsis
‘I feared this would be my life forever, and I was too scared to touch things in case the sepsis came back.’
Bill took time off work to care for Ree who was bedridden and had to use a walker to visit the bathroom.
With medical treatment not helping her condition improve further, Ree took matters into her own hands while doctors just wanted to keep her on the same medications without considering any other options.
‘My mum told me about an anti-inflammatory diet program, so I did my own research and started it,’ Ree says.
She did away with the heavily processed food she had consumed all her adult life in place of only natural, clean ingredients.
‘Before, I wouldn’t eat breakfast, then have chocolate during the day with Coke or lemonade, then lunch would be takeaway deep fried chicken, fish and chips, Maccas or a ham and cheese sandwich,’ she says.
‘Then dinner with the family would be chicken parm and chips or a home-cooked meat pie with chips.’
Once she started the program, Ree’s breakfast would be chicken, turkey or beef homemade meatballs, then chicken breast or another lean protein with veggies or salad for lunch. Dinner would be the same as lunch.
‘I also took some collagen supplements, which helped heal my gut and help shift my inflammation,’ she says.
But just as she began to find a glimmer of hope with her this new diet, she had a crushing check-up.
‘I’d just started eating well, and my specialist said, “Someone who has gone through all that you have, I think you have five years [to live] with no quality of life”,’ she says.
‘I said, “Pardon?!” I just burst into tears. I felt like western medicine had given up on me. I knew I couldn’t listen to her and have a positive outcome, so I didn’t make another appointment with her and kept going with my diet.’
Ree had struggled with her weight since she was diagnosed with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) aged 16 and says it just kept going “up and up”.
‘I became so withdrawn from the world,’ she says.
While Ree never started the diet to lose weight – only to lessen the inflammation in her body – but as a result of eating so well, she lost an incredible 50 kg in 12 months.
Starting at 148kg, her lowest weight last year was 84kg, which has now levelled out at 89kg.
‘I don’t look at the scale much,’ she says.
‘It’s not about my weight – it’s about being healthy, so taking a drug like Ozempic was never an option.
‘For the first 30kg I lost, I still couldn’t do any exercise, but after that, I found the strength to be able to go for walks and built up from there.’
Ree is now a picture of good health – all of it her own doing.
She has reversed her type two diabetes, come off 12 medications (which included Celebrex, Norflex, Tramadol, Diazepam, Baclofen, Lyrica and Physeptone (similar to methadone for chronic pain), and no longer has any pain in her right leg.
‘I will have lymphedema forever but I feel the best now that I ever have in my life, and it’s because of how I changed my gut health,’ she says.
‘We eat high protein that’s very clean and low GI, but Bill and I still have our one treat – a slice of cheesecake on our weekly coffee date. But now, instead of looking forward to what’s on Netflix and devouring a block of chocolate or a pack of ice creams, wondering what was missing from my life, I just want to get out and enjoy the world.’
The scars on her leg are now the only reminder of how close she came to losing her life.
Ree is now happy and healthy and calls the sepsis her ‘second blessing’, saying it was a wake up call for her to ‘live life the way she was meant to’
‘For a long time, I had to be extremely cautious if I got even a little scratch or a mozzie bite on my right leg – I was told it could end up really bad,’ she says.
‘I was told being overweight before wouldn’t have caused sepsis or the lymphedema, but being so unhealthy could have contributed to how my body handled it. But now my health is so good, that’s not something I worry about like I used to.’
Ree now lives life to the fullest every single day.
She is a health mentor, exercises twice a week with a personal trainer, goes bushwalking and kayaking on weekends, and has just been on a paddle boarding and snorkeling holiday with Bill, who has also lost 27kg.
‘I call [the sepsis] my second blessing,’ she says
‘It was a traumatic experience but surviving it gave me purpose to see that it’s my time to make a change. It was the wakeup call that I needed to live the way I was meant to.’
