On his 54th birthday, former Disney animator Gary Andrews started a Doodle Diary to document his wonderful life with his wife and two children.
Little did he know that in 3 years, his life as he knew it would change forever.
While on a work trip in Canada, Gary’s wife became sick with what seemed to be a simple flu. Soon, her health began to deteriorate rapidly. Gary booked the first flight home, but as soon as the plane landed, he received the tragic news: Joy had succumbed to sepsis.
Left with two children to raise by himself, Gary was left emotionally scarred after his wife’s sudden and untimely death.
Struggling to comprehend his grief, Gary decided to pour all of his feelings onto the pages of his notebook.
“I was crying so hard it was difficult to focus on the page. I was drawing through tears,” Gary said.
“Joy had been my soulmate for 19 years. She was beautiful, kind, generous and funny. We did everything together. When I lost her, I felt half of me had gone,” he added.
Considered a ‘silent killer’, sepsis accounts for the deaths of 44,000 people in the UK and more than a million in the US every year. It can be easily treated with simple antibiotics during its initial stages. But sepsis is tricky to diagnose: symptoms include fever, sickness, blotchy skin and dizziness. More often than not, these signs are mistaken for other diseases and sepsis goes unrecognized until it’s already too late.
Despite the overwhelming feeling of loss, Gary doesn’t blame anyone for what happened. “From the minute Joy was admitted to hospital, specialists from every department tried to find out what was wrong,” he said. “They couldn’t have done more. It wasn’t until the post-mortem that they narrowed it down to sepsis.”
