When Gill Fyffe was told she needed a blood transfusion due to complications after the birth of her daughter, Lucy, she was reticent. It was 1988, the height of the AIDS crisis and Ms Fyffe, a teacher from St Andrews, had been trained to understand the risk of contaminated blood - to the point that at work, she was not allowed to touch a child’s grazed knee without protective gloves. “I asked the consultant if it was safe and he told me it was 100 per cent safe,” she recalls.
“That was a red flag for me immediately, he was just dismissing my concerns.” One nurse, however, whispered to her that she should avoid a transfusion at all costs. “She said to me that it wasn’t just AIDS, it was hepatitis and all kinds of things,” she says.
“I didn’t even really know what hepatitis was at the time.” She finally went ahead with the transfusion after medics at Ninewells Hospital in Dundee warned her husband, Stan, that she may not make it through the night without it. “The irony was they didn’t even get around to giving it to me until the next morning,” she says.
“Stan was furious when he came in and found out.” She went home to begin life as a new mother of two, to Lucy and then-three-year-old son Rory. Within months, however, she began to realise something was not right.
She suffered from crippling tiredness to the point that she fell asleep at the wheel of her car - and her hair started falling out. Yet it was not until seven years later that she was to.