Jackie Bachteler Returns to Burnley: A Journey from ICU to the Dugout
Jackie Bachteler will walk out at Turf Moor on Sunday, take her place in the dugout and lead Burnley against Sunderland in the Women’s Championship at 14:00 BST.
Nine months ago, she thought she would never walk again. She thought she might not live.
The 37-year-old American arrived from San Diego in December 2025, eager to throw herself into a new role with Burnley’s women’s first team and the men’s academy. New country, new club, new challenge. A few weeks in, she felt run down and put it down to jet lag, long days and a stubborn winter cold.
Then one morning at the training ground, everything changed.
“I walked in and the whole room spun,” she told BBC Sport. She stepped outside for air, but breathing became a battle. She knew this wasn’t tiredness. This was something else.
She called for the club doctor. The men’s team doctor was on site and checked her over. Her blood pressure was falling fast, her oxygen levels were dangerously low. Within moments she was in an ambulance, heading for A&E, bracing herself for the worst.
“To be honest, I thought I was going to die. I just had this feeling in my body like ‘this is it’. I knew something was wrong.”
At first, hospital staff treated her lungs and tried to discharge her. Bachteler refused to accept it.
“They gave me some treatment for my lungs and then they tried to send me home, but I knew something wasn’t right and asked them to do more.”
They checked her blood pressure again. It collapsed. She tried to stand and couldn’t. The room tilted, her thoughts blurred, blotches began to appear on her skin.
A blood test finally triggered the alarm. “All of a sudden four or five doctors were sprinting towards me,” she said. “I had two IVs with fluids and antibiotics, as well as an oxygen mask.”
The diagnosis: sepsis. A life-threatening reaction to infection that can shut down the body in hours.
She was moved into intensive care. For a couple of days, doctors tested her blood every 20 minutes and monitored her organs. Machines beeped, numbers flashed, staff moved constantly around her. Her family in the United States could not get to England. Her wife, stuck in Finland in a snowstorm, could not reach her either.
Bachteler lay in ICU, alone and unsure how close she was to the edge.
“On my third day in hospital, I tried to stand up and I couldn’t. 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.”
She left hospital needing to learn to walk again. Football, tactics, training plans – all of it stopped. Her coaching career went on hold while she tried simply to regain control of her own body.
Burnley waited. In July, they welcomed her back as manager of the women’s team.
She returned, but not as the same person who had walked into the training ground months earlier thinking she had a cold. She is still living with post-sepsis syndrome – dizzy spells, extreme fatigue, mental fog, memory lapses, trembling when she overexerts.
Even pre-season reminded her how fragile recovery can be. During a friendly, the heat hit the bench hard.
“It was so hot with the sun facing the bench. I got up in the second half and it was like when you have too much wine, you get up and you’re like, ‘woah!’
“I was just so dizzy. I gave the instruction, talked to the team and then I went to the cafe on site and said to them: ‘Can I sit in your freezer?’
“I just needed to calm down. Then I started crying because my nervous system is still recovering and it’s just been really, really hard.”
Through it all, she points to Burnley’s medical staff and colleagues as the reason she is still here. She says the club doctors “saved her life” and linked her with a respiratory specialist. She leans on her coaching staff, calling them “phenomenal”, and has learned to delegate.
Messages from players have helped. So has the constant backing from home. But that support has come with its own emotional weight.
She remembers a Sunday in May, her parents having flown in from the US. They went for dinner. The noise in the restaurant built. Her dizziness surged.
“We went for Sunday dinner and it was loud. I just got so dizzy and they could see it. As we were walking back, I was shaking and I didn’t know where I was,” she said.
“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 my wife was able to see me [in hospital], she just started crying because of the amount of weight I lost.
“I’m really athletic and I’m really fit, but then I wasn’t able to walk. She had to hold me up going down the stairs.”
The rehab continues. She still attends respiratory therapy to strengthen her lungs. Fatigue can crash over her without warning. Her mind sometimes clouds, memories slip, her body trembles if she pushes too far. The dizzy spells still come.
Yet she feels the tide has turned.
“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 thought: this is a second chance. Football has shifted in her mind. The pressure is still there, but it lands differently.
“A loss is a loss. 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,” she said.
Sunday will be more than just Burnley v Sunderland. The match at Turf Moor falls on World Sepsis Day, a detail that feels almost scripted to her.
Her brush with death has turned her into an advocate as well as a manager. She wants people to recognise the symptoms she missed.
“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 onto the Turf Moor pitch, whistle in hand, mind on shape and substitutions, there will be another story running underneath. A coach who could not stand up in a hospital ward now standing on a professional touchline, on a day dedicated to the illness that almost took her.
“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.”
From ICU to the home dugout, from oxygen mask to technical area. The next 90 minutes will count in the table – but for Jackie Bachteler, they will measure something far bigger.
