Jackie Bachteler's Inspiring Return as Burnley Women's Manager

Jackie Bachteler will walk out at Turf Moor on Sunday, into the home dugout for the first time as Burnley’s women’s manager. Nine months ago, she could barely walk at all.

The 37-year-old American arrived from San Diego in December, energised by a new role working with Burnley’s women’s first team and the men’s academy. New country, new club, new challenge. She put the fatigue down to jet lag, the sniffles down to a cold, the tiredness down to long days and English winter.

Then one morning at the training ground, the room started spinning.

She tried to steady herself, to get some air. Breathing suddenly felt like work. Something was badly wrong. She called for the club doctor. The men’s team medic was on site and checked her over. Her blood pressure fell, her oxygen levels crashed. The urgency in the room changed in an instant.

She was rushed to A&E. Sepsis. A word she barely knew, now attached to a life-threatening diagnosis.

“I thought I was going to die,” she told BBC Sport. “I just had this feeling in my body like ‘this is it’. I knew something was wrong.”

Doctors treated her lungs and prepared to discharge her, but her body was screaming at her that this wasn’t over. She pushed for more tests. That decision, she believes, saved her life.

Her blood pressure plummeted again. She couldn’t walk. Dizziness blurred into confusion. Blotches appeared on her skin. Then came the sprinting doctors, the IV lines, the oxygen mask, the antibiotics flooding her system. She was moved into intensive care. Every 20 minutes, blood tests. Constant checks on her organs. The fight was now minute-to-minute.

Her family in the United States couldn’t get to her. Her wife, in Finland, was grounded by a snowstorm. Bachteler lay in an ICU bed in a new country, alone and unsure how close the line really was.

On the third day, she tried to stand.

Nothing.

“The nurses told me not to walk and when you hear that it’s a bit of an alarm bell,” she said. “It was just lung treatment after lung treatment, fluids after fluids, antibiotics and everything else. I had to get help to use the bathroom.

“It was close to when you face your mortality. It just gives you another perspective on life.”

The coach who prided herself on being “really athletic” and “really fit” suddenly had to learn to walk again. Her career was forced into pause. Burnley waited. In July, they brought her back as manager of the women’s team.

The recovery, though, is nowhere near complete.

Bachteler lives with post-sepsis syndrome. Dizzy spells. Severe fatigue. Mental fog. Memory lapses. Tremors when she pushes herself too far. Her nervous system is still trying to catch up with what her body went through.

It hit her hard again during a pre-season friendly a few weeks ago. The sun beat down on the dugout. In the second half, she stood up and the world lurched.

“It was like when you have too much wine, you get up and you’re like, ‘woah!’ I was just so dizzy,” she said. She delivered her instructions, spoke to her players, then went straight to the on-site café and asked: “Can I sit in your freezer?”

She just needed to cool down, to reset. Instead, the emotion crashed over her.

“I started crying because my nervous system is still recovering and it’s just been really, really hard.”

Through it all, Burnley have wrapped support around her. She credits the club doctors with saving her life and connecting her with a respiratory specialist. Her staff have taken on extra responsibilities. She calls them “phenomenal”. Messages from players have helped on the darker days.

Her family have carried their own burden. In May, her parents flew over from the US. They went out for a Sunday dinner. The noise, the movement, the lights – it was too much.

“I just got so dizzy and they could see it,” she said. “As we were walking back, I was shaking and I didn’t know where I was.

“They started crying, both of them. I think it was even harder for them. I get emotional any time I talk about my family with this.”

When her wife finally reached her in hospital, the shock was immediate. The weight loss. The frailty. The woman who used to sprint down touchlines now needed to be held up going down stairs.

Bachteler continues respiratory therapy to rebuild her lungs. The fatigue still stalks her. The mental fog still drifts in. The tremors still come if she pushes too hard. But the trajectory, she insists, is upward.

“I’m definitely in a good way though. I’m about 70 to 80% Jackie again and that’s thanks to the club, the doctors here and the NHS – but it was close.

“If I had gone home that day when the emergency room tried to send me back, I wouldn’t be sitting here today.”

Every day she leaves the training ground with the same quiet thought: second chance.

Football, inevitably, looks different now.

“A loss is a loss,” she said. “I really believe in what I’m doing and in the people that I’m doing it with. Now the worst thing that will happen is that we lose a game.”

On Sunday, when Burnley face Sunderland in the Women’s Super League 2 at Turf Moor (14:00 BST), that perspective will be impossible to ignore. It is World Sepsis Day. The timing is not lost on her.

She has learned just how deadly sepsis is, how often it goes unseen, how many people live with the aftermath.

“I realised it’s a leading cause of death. I didn’t even know what sepsis was before. I thought it was something you heard on Grey’s Anatomy,” she said.

“I didn’t understand the severity of it and how much it’s missed by doctors. The amount of people that have been affected really shocked me. It’s a silent killer.

“Hopefully I can use the game as a tool to help others recognise the signs and let them know they are not alone. Over 50% of survivors have post-sepsis syndrome.”

So when she steps out at Turf Moor, onto the pitch she dreamed of working on every day, she will do so knowing how close she came to never seeing it.

To her, it feels almost scripted.

“To be standing on the pitch, doing something that I love, that I’ve dreamed of doing every single day and knowing that wouldn’t have been the case almost a year ago, it’s a bit poetic it’s on World Sepsis Day.”