‘Both my legs kind of went numb, and I just couldn’t really walk on them,” says Brooke Aspin. One of England’s most promising young footballers is recalling just one of many harrowing moments she experienced last year when what initially appeared to be a muscle pull in her groin drastically worsened.
In August 2022, Aspin had gone to support her team, Bristol City, for their first game of the Championship season against Coventry. It was, she says, “one of the worst decisions”. She was sick during the bus journey. At Coventry’s ground, she had to use crutches to climb the steps. “It took me about 20 minutes to get up there,” she says. “And then that was a bit of a traumatic time.”
After she got home, Aspin’s mother took her to hospital. What happened next was beyond what Aspin, or anyone else around her, had imagined.
In total, Aspin spent three weeks and one day in hospital. She lost 12kg in muscle mass. She survived a bone infection, a blood clot and, worst of all, sepsis, a life-threatening illness. The World Health Organisation estimates that 42% of people who are admitted to intensive care with sepsis will die. Aspin spent about a week in intensive care.
“I see life as something that you just have to enjoy, you have to live every moment now,” says Aspin, as we sit across a table at Bristol City’s training ground. Aspin is fresh from the gym, her water bottle and nutrition drink by her side. “As soon as I walk out on that pitch, then I’m loving every moment because I’m playing what I love and I may not have got that opportunity before.” She reveals a tattoo on her right upper arm, inspired by her time in hospital. “Cherish every moment,” it reads.
Aspin isn’t just back: she’s smashing it. Last Sunday, she scored her first Women’s Super League goal: a second-half header that secured City’s first win this season, against West Ham. (“I’m buzzing!” she says.) In July, she signed her first professional contract with Chelsea, six-times WSL champions. Much out of loyalty, she was immediately loaned back to Bristol City, the club she has played for since she was 16. “I definitely owe them something,” she says. On joining, Aspin’s talent was such that she went virtually straight into the first team, having played at county level for Somerset, where she grew up.
Aspin wants to talk about sepsis. She wants people to know about the symptoms. “I think raising that awareness is so key,” she says. “And someone as fit and young and healthy as me – it hit me like a ton of bricks … I don’t want it to affect anyone else as much as it affected me.” Last month, she shared her story with the charity Sepsis Research FEAT for Sepsis Awareness Month.
Aged only 17 at the time, Aspin was treated in the children’s high-dependency unit of Musgrove Park hospital and, later, in intensive care. After myriad tests, doctors found a bone infection in her pelvic area, with complications including a blood clot that required an operation. Her body had fought the infection so hard that it turned on itself: she had contracted sepsis. “[When] the sepsis started,” she recalls, “I’ve got a picture in my head where I was in one of the beds, and I suddenly went really, really hot. And it was like: ‘Oh, my God, I’m boiling.’ Twenty seconds later, I was freezing.”
Aspin makes brief but stark references to how serious her condition was. “All I was focusing on was hopefully making it out of hospital,” she says. One of the hardest parts was “seeing myself kind of slowly fade away”. “I was strong, confident in myself, and then I lost so much muscle that it was just me sat in a bed not knowing where I was going to end up. But I had my mum, I had my dad by my side. And it was like, hopefully, battling through each day as it comes. Thankfully, I made it out the other side.”
In August, Aspin did a skydive to raise money for the hospital’s children’s unit, praising the nurses who looked after her. Recovery was a long process, about six months in total. Aspin readily admits her frustrations. “I got on the physios’ nerves and they got on mine,” she says, laughing. “We can both say that.” She would watch her teammates doing drills outside, while she was limited to a small walk each day. When she left hospital, she could walk only from the ward bed to the car – about three minutes.
Aspin loves the gym. At first, she struggled to look at herself in the mirror because she had lost so much muscle. Today, Aspin is back to the weight she was before. “It shows that if you take [it] day by day, and step by step, that actually little things do improve and you get back to where you were eventually,” she says.
Incredibly, she recovered enough to play the tail end of Bristol City’s season. In April, she scored against Charlton, with the win securing her side’s promotion to the WSL. This season, her main aim is avoiding relegation. “I believe in this club that we can actually stay up,” she says. (Bristol City are one of only two clubs in the WSL not to reap the financial benefits of being paired with a Premier League side.)
Further down the line, Aspin has big hopes. She wants to captain Chelsea and win the Champions League. She wants to captain England at senior level – she currently leads the under-19s – and to win the World Cup. “That’s high ambitions,” she says, “but I’ve got so much faith that if I put the work in behind the scenes, then hopefully I can do that.”
Lastly, Aspin doesn’t want people to feel sorry for her. “I’m never going to push past the fact that I did have sepsis and it was one of the trickiest times of my life,” she says. “But it’s one of those things where I don’t really want people to sympathise over me any more. I’ve come across that, I’ve battled through that, and it’s now where I’m going.” Aspin is truly taking the ball – and she’s running with it.
