The World at One was just starting on Radio 4 when my phone rang. Maureen’s number. A call was unusual – she always WhatsApped, and we’d spoken and messaged over the previous two days. She lived on the Costa del Sol, where the Covid lockdown had been, literally, policed. She was ok but “browned-off”, an adventurer with cabin fever. The voice on the phone was male, a neighbour, and it told me Maureen was in hospital. I assumed, perhaps, a fall – but surely nothing life threatening. I asked if I should come out. “She’s on life support.” Words you hope never to hear, and probably don’t expect to. “Some kind of infection." I said I wouldn’t talk now – I needed to book a flight – but what were her chances? “Less than 10%.” I asked that he request the hospital try to keep her alive till I arrived.

I took the first available flight. Covid protocols meant I couldn’t just walk into the hospital in Malaga but finally I was ushered into a dimly-lit anteroom where a couple of her close friends waited silently with nurses and a doctor, who began to speak in a mixture of Spanish and broken English, the tenses awry as they often are when we speak in a language other than our own. He’d barely finished his first sentence when, out of nowhere, I asked: “Sepsis?” He probably thought I knew more than I did, and I think he asked if I wanted Maureen to be transferred to London. I replied no, Spanish treatment was excellent. Did I want to see her? Of course I did. He ushered me into the room where she lay, surrounded by technology. I kissed her, felt under the sheet for her hand. Stupidly it took me a few moments before I realised: she was dead.

When I eventually got the death certificate, after the funeral, I saw I had arrived just 15 minutes too late. The cause of death was indeed Sepsis, caused by something very obscure indeed – Ludwig’s Angina, “a medical emergency caused by bilateral cellulitis of the submandibular, sublingual and submental spaces”, usually an infection in a lower molar. She had apparently told neighbours and a couple of friends that she had a sore throat and glands, didn’t feel like eating. But no, she didn’t want a doctor. She was over-ruled on the Sunday evening, but the ambulance took time to come, and it appears the local hospital in Benalmadena to which she was taken did not immediately know what was wrong. Sometime overnight, after those who took her in had gone home, she was transferred to Malaga. By then it was too late, nothing they could do worked. I try to take comfort in the fact that I was spared an awful decision enabling her to live, but at a terrible cost. Maureen would have hated that. But I also worry: did I miss something when we spoke, which had been my birthday?

We’ve all heard about Sepsis, occasionally hear on the news about a high-profile death from it. But few of us know how deadly it is, how utterly evil, how quickly the infection lays waste to your vital organs. How little time you have. And how vigilant we should all be. No one should die of ignorance,

Maureen and I were ten years apart and she had spent most of her life in and around Spain. We were different yet similar. Often drove each other crazy. I was more boringly responsible. But we loved each other and there was just the two of us. Sometimes I still find it hard to believe she’s gone and there were many times over the last three years when I’ve felt cross with her, for sorting out her off-grid life has been complicated indeed and the final documents were signed only in October.

Hence this appeal now, as a group of her friends join me at a donkey sanctuary in the hills above La Cala de Mijas to celebrate her life. Donkey Dreamland it’s called and it is there we scattered her ashes in January last year, and to them I gifted her Mijitas studio. Cudeca, the hospice in Arroyo founded by a British woman, is gifted her apartment in Benalmadena.

Closure is an over-used word, but in gathering together to enjoy the wines and food she loved so much on the coast where she had spent almost half her life (she was a tour guide, living and travelling all over Spain, clearly beloved by her clients) we will conjure up her vibrant spirit and remember the good times.

Every three seconds, someone in the world dies of sepsis. In the UK alone, 245,000 people are affected by sepsis with at least 48,000 people losing their lives in sepsis-related illnesses annually. More than breast, bowel and prostate cancer combined. Globally, sepsis claims 11 million lives a year. Yet, for many patients, with early diagnosis it is easily treatable.

I would ask Maureen’s many friends, and our remaining family, to support my JustGiving appeal for Sepsis UK in the hope that we can prevent more people dying unnecessarily.

Muchas gracias!

LIZ