Rachael Lucas said her skin looked as if it has been “eaten by zombies.”
A former counsellor has spoken of her horror after her ‘flu’ turned out to be deadly meningitis, which robbed her of her legs and left her flesh looking like she had been “eaten by zombies.”
Waking one April morning feeling achy and nauseous, Rachael Lucas, 47, assumed she had a bug and tried to sleep it off – only for her managing director husband, Ian, 48, to find her delirious and covered in a worrying rash when he checked on her later.
Raced to hospital, Rachael, who lives near Birmingham, spent a week in an induced coma as doctors battled to stop her organs shutting down – sadly failing, despite their best efforts, to save her legs, which had to be amputated.
Rachael said: “My memory is still incredibly hazy, but I remember waking up a week after getting to hospital, looking down, and seeing all these dark patches of dead tissue on my legs. It almost looked like streaky bacon.
“Nurses kept coming in and bandaging me up, but my flesh was dying. I felt like I was in a horror movie, being eaten by zombies.”
Since the 2012 drama, Rachael has embarked on a long road to recovery – made all the more difficult by the fact that her leg bones continued to grow following the amputation, meaning she needed surgery to trim them before she could be fitted with a prosthesis.
Her one comfort throughout the horror was meditation, which provided her with such solace she now hopes to launch her own series of tracks aimed at fellow amputees in the New Year.
She explained: “I’ve always been into spiritualism, so questions of karma, and ‘why me’ did play on my mind. Friends sent me meditation tracks, but when I started listening to them, I found them really upsetting.
“So much of mediation is aimed at feelings in your fingers and toes, or walking – which obviously isn’t me anymore. Disabled and limbless people are almost an unseen society, but we want and deserve that safe, peaceful space that mediation provides everyone else.”
Rachael’s nightmare, which she continues to recover from to this day, began, ironically, on April Fool’s Day 2012.
Waking up around 6am, she felt fluey, and vomited all over her bed – getting worse throughout the day, although she never once considered she might have meningitis.
“I figured I could sleep it off,” she said. “Then, at about 9pm, my husband Ian came up with a cup of tea and I was really delirious. He also noticed I had a rash all over my arms, so sprang into action and did the glass test.”
She added: “I don’t know if he was thinking about meningitis, but my rash didn’t fade under the glass, which is a telltale sign, so he dialled 999.”
Raced to Good Hope Hospital in Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands, she was placed in an induced coma.
Horrifyingly, Ian, who was keeping vigil at her bedside, was told she had contracted meningitis and warned she may not make it.
“My dad had actually passed away a few months before of multiple organ failure in that same hospital, so I’d been taken into that same little side room as Ian and given the same awful news,” said Rachael.
Coming to a week later, she realised the tissue on her legs had died – a process known as necrosis.
Then, after meeting with a burns consultant, she was transferred to the more specialist Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, where, on April 23, she had her first amputation to remove both her feet.
She said: “I woke up and, on autopilot, tried to get out of bed. Then I looked down and realised I had no feet.”
Tragically, Rachael’s ordeal was far from over and, during the next two months, she had further surgery to remove her dying tissue, resulting in her needing everything below the knee amputated.
Due to complications, she also required an ileostomy – where the small intestine is diverted through an opening in the abdomen.
After spending time at a rehabilitation centre, followed by a trip back to hospital to reverse her ileostomy, she was finally allowed home in October 2012.
“I hadn’t seen my house in months, but we had to change absolutely everything,” she said. “At first, I slept downstairs in a hospital bed. But Ian took care of things like widening the doors to fit my wheelchair and, by early 2013, the house was ready.”
Emotionally, though, Rachael continued to struggle.
She added: “It was so hard to get my head around. Life had completely changed overnight. I’d been a bereavement counsellor for years before this happened, so I knew I had to go through the grieving process.
“But it was incredibly tough. I’d lost everything – my freedom, my identity, my idea of who I was.”
Rachael had hoped to get prosthetic limbs relatively quickly, but faced a setback when she experienced ossification – the abnormal growth of bone in non-skeletal tissues, like muscles and tendons.
She explained: “On the X Ray, my legs looked like coral, with little shards coming off the main bone.”
In 2015, she had yet another operation to tackle the ossification, and was fitted with a prosthesis soon after.
However, due to needing further scar revision surgery, she never had them for long, instead going months between using them.
“I’d have them on for a little while, then off for months as I recovered,” she said. “Earlier this month, I finally got some new ones fitted.
“So far, I can’t wear them for long as my skin is still so fragile, so I am prone to blisters. But I’m determined to get back on my home treadmill and start to build my fitness up again.”
As well as rebuilding her strength, Rachael has vowed to dedicate 2019 to working to improve emotional support for amputees.
One day hoping to also help advise counsellors on how to treat patients like herself, her more immediate goal is to launch a range of meditation tracks for amputees, which she is due to begin recording in January.
She is also working alongside the charity Meningitis Now to help raise awareness of the symptoms to watch out for, including fever, vomiting, drowsiness, a stiff neck, severe headaches and dislike of bright lights.
And, though she says there are still days where she struggles with the emotional fallout of her ordeal, Rachael believes her near death experience has brought her and Ian closer together.
“We were actually going through a rough patch before all of this, but I think it made us realise what we could lose,” she said, adding that she has also found salvation in singing with her band, Hybrid Spirits, who are currently working on their second album. “Now, we’re absolutely brilliant.
“If Ian hadn’t come in with a cup of tea that day, I have no doubt I wouldn’t be here now.”
Rachael is backing Meningitis Now’s ‘Adults Get It Too’ campaign. For information, visit www.meningitisnow.org/meningitis-explained/signs-and-symptoms/meningitis-adults
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) — Reigning Indianapolis 500 champion Josef Newgarden blinked back tears Friday as he accepted blame for manipulating the push-to-pass system in his season-opening IndyCar win that has since been stripped, calling it an embarrassment and acknowledging that he may have a long road ahead in winning back the respect of his peers.
During an emotional 25-minute news conference at Barber Motorsports Park ahead of this weekend's race, the two-time series champion insisted he is “not a liar” and didn't intentionally break the rules. It was his first public comment since IndyCar took away his March 10 victory at St. Petersburg, Florida — the first disqualification by the series in 29 years.
“I want to deeply apologize to our fans, our partners, my teammates, the competitors that I race against,” Newgarden said. “Anybody that’s in our community. I’ve worked my entire career to hold myself to a very high standard and clearly I’ve fallen very short of that in this respect. It’s a difficult thing to wrestle with. It’s a very embarrassing thing to go through.”
Newgarden stripping his win was “absolutely” the right decision by the open-wheel series whose owner, Roger Penske, also runs Newgarden's team and is one of the giants in motorsports. The decision has thrown IndyCar into turmoil as it prepares for next month's showcase Indianapolis 500.
“It’s crushing. I’m going to look back on it, too, and say I don’t want that win on my books, either,” Newgarden said, his voice wavering. “I’m glad they’re taking it away. If it was tainted, I don’t want to be near it. Unfortunately it is. I can’t reverse that in time. It’s good what’s happened.”
Team Penske teammate Scott McLaughlin, who finished third, also was disqualified while fourth-place finisher Will Power was docked 10 points though he wasn't accused of any wrongdoing. The Penske drivers were fined $25,000 because the manipulated systems were on all three cars.
The team has maintained that the push-to-pass system on its three Chevrolets was used in a test session and then mistakenly not replaced before the season began. It remained on the cars for three races, until it was discovered last weekend just before the race at Long Beach, California.
IndyCar President Jay Frye said the series will begin locking a logging unit on cars immediately after qualifying, blocking teams from making any changes in push-to-pass before a race.
“It’s very hard to police intent or to evaluate intent,” Frye said. “So at the end of the day it is about data. It’s on us. We didn’t catch it at St. Pete. We’ve put mechanisms in place we think should prevent it from happening again.”
Mark Miles, CEO of IndyCar and Penske Entertainment, said there was no conflict with Penske as series boss.
“What was really important to us was there was never any question of any interference,” Miles said. “We could be objective and handle the data in the same way we would have handled it for any other team.”
IndyCar prohibits the use of the system on starts and restarts and the button isn’t supposed to work on those occasions. Onboard videos clearly show Newgarden using push-to-pass to gain position on at least one restart at St. Petersburg.
Newgarden said he believed the restart rule implemented with the Thermal race in March extended into the season so push-to-pass could be used “immediately on restarts."
”You guys can call me every name in the book, you can call me incompetent, call me an idiot ... call me stupid, whatever you want to call me, but I’m not a liar," Newgarden said. “The story that I know, which is the truth, is almost too convenient to be believable. So to answer your question, no, I didn’t leave St. Pete thinking we pulled something over on somebody. I didn’t know that we did something wrong until this week.”
The issue was discovered Sunday in California when a glitch knocked push-to-pass out on all cars except the three Penske entries. IndyCar ordered the team to correct the systems before the race.
Penske, Newgarden said, “did not take it well. I was interrogated at first.”
“I've not met somebody with higher integrity than that man, and I mean that,” Newgarden said. Team Penske President Tim Cindric, who has denied any intentional wrongdoing, declined a request for an interview Friday.
Newgarden, featured on the season opener of “100 Days to Indy” airing Friday night, said he didn't know he had broken the rules until Monday, the day after the manipulated systems were discovered at Long Beach. He choked back tears several times when addressing the incident, including when asked what he has to do to regain the trust of his competitors.
“I don’t know how you do that,” Newgarden said. "I don’t know that anybody’s going to believe what I’ve told you here today. And that’s OK. It’s a crazy set of circumstances to try to wrestle with. It’s certainly not going to come with words. I’ll just try and earn it through action.”
Andretti Global driver Colton Herta, who moved up to third at St. Pete with the disqualifications, said he isn't buying that Newgarden didn't realize he was breaking the rules.
"That’s wrong. If he thought that, why didn’t he push it at the start?" Herta said. “He didn’t push it at the start. He pushed it on the restarts. You would think when everybody is stacked up the most, you would push it. So that’s a lie.”
Pato O'Ward, the Arrow McLaren driver who wound up getting the win at St. Pete, said Newgarden could not have acted alone.
“I can guarantee you, it’s not just Josef in this,” O'Ward said. “Obviously what he did was wrong, but I truly feel like him taking the fall for something that he needs a team of people to help with -- he can’t do it alone -- I think it’s a bit unfair to him.”
Gavin Ward, in his first year as team principal for Arrow McLaren, said the team messed up, not just Newgarden. Ward was a race engineer for Team Penske and held that role for Newgarden in the driver's 2019 IndyCar championship run and his runner-up finishes in 2020 and 2021.
Ward said team officials know when a driver presses overtake.
“It’s a flag on everybody’s monitoring,” he said. “Everybody knows when you use the overtake. You telling me none of them realized that was not in the rules? Everybody had the wrong read of it?”
It was the first time the series has disqualified a race winner since Al Unser Jr. at Portland in 1995 over the height of the car's chassis from the ground, a decision that Unser — who was driving for Penske at the time — successfully appealed.
“For this to happen to Team Penske is an eye-opener," Unser told NBC Sports. “In NASCAR, you got to race the rulebook, right? I mean, everybody cheats at NASCAR; it’s just all about getting caught. But in IndyCar, they don’t. This is highly irregular."
AP IndyCar: https://apnews.com/hub/indycar
FILE - Team Penske driver Josef Newgarden, center, celebrates his first place finish along with second place finisher Arrow McLaren driver Pato O'Ward of Mexico, left, and third place finisher Team Penske driver Scott McLaughlin of New Zealand in the IndyCar Grand Prix of St. Petersburg auto race, Sunday, March 10, 2024, in St. Petersburg, Fla. Team Penske suffered a humiliating disqualification Wednesday, April 24, when reigning Indianapolis 500 winner Josef Newgarden was stripped of his victory in the season-opening race for manipulating his push-to-pass system. Penske teammate Scott McLaughlin, who finished third in the opener on the downtown streets of St. Petersburg, Florida, was also disqualified. (AP Photo/Mike Carlson)
FILE - Team Penske driver Josef Newgarden, center, celebrates his first place finish along with second place finisher Arrow McLaren driver Pato O'Ward of Mexico, left, and third place finisher Team Penske driver Scott McLaughlin of New Zealand in the IndyCar Grand Prix of St. Petersburg auto race, Sunday, March 10, 2024, in St. Petersburg, Fla. Team Penske suffered a humiliating disqualification Wednesday, April 24, when reigning Indianapolis 500 winner Josef Newgarden was stripped of his victory in the season-opening race for manipulating his push-to-pass system. Penske teammate Scott McLaughlin, who finished third in the opener on the downtown streets of St. Petersburg, Florida, was also disqualified. (AP Photo/Mike Carlson, File)
FILE - Team Penske driver Josef Newgarden, right, celebrates his victory with team owner Roger Penske after the IndyCar Grand Prix of St. Petersburg auto race, Sunday, March 10, 2024, in St. Petersburg, Fla. Team Penske suffered a humiliating disqualification Wednesday, April 24, when reigning Indianapolis 500 winner Josef Newgarden was stripped of his victory in the season-opening race for manipulating his push-to-pass system. Penske teammate Scott McLaughlin, who finished third in the opener on the downtown streets of St. Petersburg, Florida, was also disqualified. (AP Photo/Mike Carlson, File)
Team Penske driver Josef Newgarden races during a qualifying session for the IndyCar Grand Prix of Long Beach auto race Saturday, April 20, 2024, in Long Beach, Calif. (AP Photo/Ryan Sun)
Star driver Josef Newgarden fights back tears, accepts blame for breaking rules in IndyCar scandal
Star driver Josef Newgarden fights back tears, accepts blame for breaking rules in IndyCar scandal
