It happened to me: I nearly died after feeding my cat toast

Last year, cat-lover Graham Forster, a 50-year-old property developer who lives in Streatham, south-west London, was accidentally bitten by his Burmese cat while giving him a treat at breakfast. Later that day, he was so ill his wife took him to hospital, where he ended up fighting for his life.

Blood-poisoning: Graham Forster, 50, nearly died after he was accidentally bitten by his Burmese cat, Chedi

One morning last August, my wife, Carolina, and I decided to have breakfast in bed. As usual, Chedi and Yani, our affectionate and good-natured Burmese cats, were stretched out on the duvet asleep.



They stirred when Carolina brought in a tray with tea and toast, and Chedi, as usual, plonked himself on my lap. I had recently got into the bad habit of letting him nibble the last piece of crust of my toast out of my hand.



Chedi went for his treat rather over-enthusiastically and his jaws clamped around my left thumb. This was not accompanied by a hiss, growl or any other sign that he was being malicious, he just seemed very keen for his bit of toast.



The pain in my thumb was piercing - as though someone were sticking pins in it. I pushed Chedi off the bed and yelled a few choice expletives at him. When I looked at my thumb, there were just two tiny puncture marks but no blood.



I went for a shower and made a point of washing my hands well with soap, but there was very little damage, so off I went to work.



I'm pretty hands-on when doing up properties to sell, so often get finger injuries. The big mistake I made in this case, I later found out, was that I should have tried to make the wounds bleed, because this cleans the damaged area.



My thumb throbbed all day, but it seemed silly to make a fuss about what seemed like nothing. However, by 5pm, the throbbing was getting worse and I was quite alarmed to see that my thumb had turned an odd shade of grey. The pain was now getting really bad in my wrist too - it felt as though it was penetrating deep into the joint.



Suddenly, my heart-rate seemed to shoot up - I could feel it beating very fast, and I started sweating and felt very nauseous, which was frightening because I was on my own.

I called my GP, who told me to get to his surgery quickly. It was rush hour, so the short journey took me around 25 minutes, and I was feeling so unwell I really shouldn't have been driving.

Somehow I got to the surgery and was prescribed antibiotics and painkillers, which I shovelled down as soon as the pharmacist handed them over. The pharmacist took one look at me and said, 'If you're not feeling any better in three hours, you must go to hospital.'



When I got home, Carolina was so shocked by the way I looked that she drove me straight to St George's Hospital in Tooting. When we arrived, I was expecting a wait but was seen almost immediately.



This was just as well, as the nurse remarked that my blood pressure was very low. I heard her call for a doctor urgently, but then her voice seemed far away and I blacked out.



Next thing I knew, I had come to and was being sick. I couldn't open my eyes at first but, when I did, I could see about ten people working on me, cutting my clothes off, inserting needles and attaching electric pads to my chest. From what I could gather, they thought I was about to have a heart attack. Carolina looked ashen, but I kept saying to her, 'Don't worry... It's only a cat bite.'

Someone explained that I'd gone into toxic shock. This meant that there was poison in my system, which they had to stop from getting to my heart. You name it, I was connected up to it: there were wires coming from my chest, intravenous antibiotics, morphine.

I thought nothing of it when he clamped his jaws round my thumb. Then it went grey and pain shot up my arm. Next thing I knew I'd gone into toxic shock

I wasn't frightened, though, because the morphine was cocooning me very nicely from what was going on and making me feel very laid back. But I did think, 'Is this really what a cat can do?'



I managed to ask one of the doctors what would have happened had I not come to hospital when I did and he said, 'You have septicaemia - blood poisoning - you'd have been dead within two hours...'



Now it seemed the concern was that my thumb might have to be amputated. The doctors talked about the possibility of amputating from the wrist and someone said that they wanted to keep my elbow, but might have to amputate from there, because if the poison travelled to my shoulder, it could reach my heart via the main arteries in the arm.



In my drugged-up haze, I wondered how on earth I could work without a thumb - or an elbow, for that matter. Thankfully, I was so sedated I just went into a blissful sleep.



The following day, I had surgery to clean out my thumb. I couldn't see what was going on thank goodness, but I could hear a kind of scraping sound as they removed the poison.



The day after, I had two more operations as there were still 'grey spots' on the thumb, which indicated there was still some poison there. But I wasn't out of the woods quite yet, because my blood pressure was all over the place, and, despite all the painkillers, I was in dreadful pain.



However, I rallied fairly quickly and, on day four, I was told that my condition had stabilised enough so that I would be able to go home the following day. By now I was feeling considerably better, although very weak.



Feeling incredibly grateful that the skill of the surgeon had saved my now pink and healthy-looking thumb - and, indeed, my life - I looked forward to resting for a couple of weeks, but I wondered how I would feel when I saw Chedi again.



When I arrived home, he was sitting at the top of the stairs staring at me dolefully, almost as if he knew he had done something wrong. Many of our family and friends cannot believe that I haven't had him put down, but why would I? He's my old friend.



In any case, I felt that it was my fault for getting into that situation in the first place, feeding the cat my breakfast and not really watching what I was doing.



Our vet later told us that this was the first time he had heard of anything like this happening, but added, 'A cat's mouth is a most unpleasant place...'



I still give Chedi the corners of crust from my toast - the only difference now is that I take my hand away very quickly indeed...

