How a fish pie nearly finished off a Tory councillor in Milton Keynes

Tory Andy Dransfield 
contracted food poisoning because the pie had not been kept cool enough.

The poisoning was so severe that it spread to his blood and caused septicaemia.

It was only because he 
decided to miss a council meeting that he survived, the Citizen can reveal.

“I knew I felt rough, but I didn’t realise how ill I was,” said Andy this week.

He warmed up the pie for his supper at his Loughton home and started feeling grim the same night.

A day later, feeling no better, he went to the walk-in clinic at Milton Keynes Hospital, where doctors prescribed antihistamine for a strange red rash appearing on his body.

“I just felt worse and worse. I didn’t know what was happening,” said Andy.

Despite feeling so ill, the veteran councillor doggedly attended a fire authority meeting in the morning and a hockey foundation committee meeting in the afternoon.

“When I got home I started hallucinating. I knew then that something was really wrong,” he said.

Regardless, Andy almost set off to an evening meeting of Loughton Parish Council, which he chaired for 24 years.

But at the last minute he decided to call 111 – and was ordered to hospital.

Thinking it was an eye problem, Milton Keynes doctors sent Andy to Bedford Hospital, where an ophthalmic specialist was available.

When he arrived his blood pressure was a potentially lethal 50 over 20. He was pumped with seven litres of saline solution and antibiotics and admitted for four days.

“The doctors were wonderful. Thanks to them I’m here to tell the tale,” he said.