Sam Vanderpump has been ‘struggling’ this week. He is, he confesses, ‘tired, always tired’ and emotionally ‘on the edge’.
Sam, 28, has irreversible end-stage liver disease.
The moment he shared the devastating news with his Made In Chelsea co-stars Ollie Locke and Tabitha Willett was shown on the E4 reality TV show this week.
In a heartbreaking episode that reduced viewers to tears, this thoroughly likeable, warm-hearted young man revealed he has been advised by specialists that, without a liver transplant, his condition is likely to be fatal.
Next month, Sam will undergo an assessment to determine whether he can be approved for a transplant.
Sam, who is expecting his first child with fiancée Alice Yaxley in February, was only told of the prognosis a few days before the episode was filmed eight weeks ago.
‘The scene plays down how emotional we were. I was sobbing. Ollie was sobbing. Tabitha was sobbing,’ says Sam, who was under the care of a senior hepatologist after being hospitalised with sepsis in December last year.
‘It was so raw. I can speak to you today – have this terrible conversation – and be strong. In private, I’m still very, very emotional and you can probably see at times I’m on the edge. But I won’t break down.’
In truth, most 28-year-olds would be utterly inconsolable, especially ones with marriage plans and a baby on the way.
Look online and the survival rates for those who undergo a liver transplant are pretty grim.
‘When you first read it, it’s terrifying,’ says Sam. ‘It says there’s a 95 per cent chance [of survival] at year one, 90 per cent at year five, 80 per cent at year ten and then it starts to drop so, after 25 years, it’s fifty-fifty.
‘You always think you’re going to live to 90-odd, but past the age of 53, I’ve got a fifty-fifty chance. That’s mental.’
Sam Vanderpump, 28, shared that he had irreversible end-stage liver disease with his Made In Chelsea co-stars Ollie Locke and Tabitha Willett on the E4 reality TV show this week
Sam is expecting his first child with fiancée Alice Yaxley in February
It’s why Sam is speaking to me now. He says finding out that he needed a liver transplant was ‘the scariest thing ever’, until his mother Simone told him that she knew of a woman who’d received a transplant under the age of ten and was ‘in her 40s now with kids and going strong’.
Sam is determined to survive and to share his story with others. It is now his ‘dream’ to make a documentary about his experience to inspire others.
‘There’s so little information out there. If there’s, say, a 16-year-old going through this who can one day watch my documentary and see how I made it out the other side, I feel like that’s my duty.’
He also wants to encourage families to speak openly about organ donation. While it is now presumed that all adults in the UK are donors, relatives can decide to withold organs after a loved one’s death if the deceased has not made their wishes clear.
‘If someone hasn’t registered their wishes there’s a fifty-fifty chance the family will agree to donate their organs. If they have registered, the chances rise to 90 per cent. It’s vital you register to donate your organs to save lives.’
He doesn’t add ‘like mine’. There is no need.
The airy south-west London flat into which he and Alice moved five weeks ago is full of love and a life to be lived.
There is a cot in the partly decorated nursery and a high chair at the kitchen table ready for the baby – a boy whom they intend to call Duke – short for Marmaduke.
There is also space for a sofa bed in the sitting room. ‘If something did happen and we had a very young baby – say I was very unwell and Alice was overwhelmed – someone would be able to stay to help with the baby,’ Sam explains.
Alice, who is sitting cross-legged on a cushion on the floor, shakes her head as if to say, ‘Don’t be silly. Everything will be fine.’
Sam smiles at her. ‘We’re actually getting married in December,’ he reveals. ‘We’re not calling it a wedding. Our proper wedding will be early summer 2027 but we’re going to do a registry office with some family members.’
Alice returns his smile. ‘We were always going to have our big wedding that was going to take a few years to plan but the baby changed that. I think it’s nice that we’ll all have the same last name together,’ she says.
Sam’s eyes fill with tears. ‘I knew from the moment I met Alice that, if I was lucky enough, she’d be the girl I was going to marry but I felt you couldn’t do that after six or 12 months. But after nearly dying, it put everything into perspective.
‘Any second, anything can happen in life. I love her to pieces. I want to marry her. Why wait two years?’
Sam met Alice while watching the European Cup Final with friends in July 2024 – just five months before he was admitted to hospital with the sepsis that threatened his life.
Sam said finding out that he needed a liver transplant was ‘the scariest thing ever’
At the age of four he had been diagnosed with the rare hereditary disease congenital hepatic fibrosis, characterised by abnormal formation of the bile ducts and the blood vessels of the hepatic portal system.
However, he was regularly monitored and doctors told Sam, who also suffers from asthma, to ‘live a normal life’.
And he did, until he went down with flu at the beginning of December last year.
‘It lowered my immune system and I don’t think I ever fully recovered,’ says Sam who was rushed to hospital after several days in bed, during which time he became dehydrated and experienced severe pain in his back and shoulders.
‘Three days before he was admitted with what we now know was biliary sepsis we went to Harrods. Sam was so thirsty and a bit delirious. I thought he was taking too much codeine for his shoulder,’ says Alice.
‘His flatmate and I thought he was just still really under the weather and needed to sleep it off.
‘Then [on December 16] he was meant to fly to Dubai for work but wasn’t able to get up. His eyes and skin were yellow and his lips were crusty. I thought, ‘This isn’t okay’.’
Alice, who needed to be in Manchester for a work assignment, called an ambulance and Sam’s mother.
She did not believe his condition was life-threatening but now knows his organs were beginning to fail. If she had waited another 48 hours, Sam would have died.
‘My heart rate had sky-rocketed but my asthma was fine’ says Sam. ‘The doctors couldn’t understand what was going on. My mum says I sort of screamed at the doctor, ‘There’s something going on in my body.’
When Sam’s blood test came back his CRP levels [C-reactive protein levels, an inflammation measure that is normally below 3mg/L] were in the four hundreds. ‘You’ve never seen doctors move so fast,’ he says.
Fearing his organs were failing, medics rushed Sam to the resuscitation unit.
‘I was so out of it after that,’ says Sam. ‘I remember breaking down and crying over the phone to Alice when they told me, ‘Organ failure.’ I couldn’t finish the conversation.’
He turns to Alice. ‘I put you on the phone to my mum because I was breaking down, wasn’t I?’ Alice nods.
‘I was so delirious and it was so overwhelming. It actually makes me sick thinking about it now.’
‘We’re actually getting married in December,’ Sam reveals. ‘We’re not calling it a wedding. Our proper wedding will be early summer 2027’
Alice, who immediately returned to London, remembers, ‘Your mind just runs wild. You think, ‘What does that mean? Will there be long term damage?’
As doctors pumped him with antibiotics to try to control the infection that ravaged his body, Sam remembers little of the next 48 hours.
‘Waking up in sweats… crying… not knowing where I was. During those first few days, it was scary. You don’t want to die. It was terrifying.’
Alice sticks out her chin defiantly. ‘I never for a second thought he was going to die. Sam is a very strong, very resilient person. Anyone who actually knows you, Sam, thinks you’ll always be fine because there’s just something about you. An energy.’
On day three Sam’s CRP levels began to drop. ‘I wanted to get up, shower, have breakfast. I just clutched onto the fact they were going down. You get really excited, happy, optimistic. Clutching onto positives is my way of processing things.’
He tells me of the time his father Mark, a DJ and businessman, died of suicide in 2018. Sam was 21.
‘When my dad died, I had dreams about him. I’d imagine he was still around and sending me messages. I clutched onto that. It’s probably why I was clutching onto those CRP levels.’
Sam made himself drink two litres of water every day to flush out his body and forced himself to eat a protein-rich diet.
‘I was clutching on for dear life,’ he says. ‘I was thinking every marginal gain can put me in a better position.’
He was discharged on Christmas Eve having lost 14kg in weight. He remained very poorly but slowly recuperated.
In March he asked Alice to marry him. They celebrated with their families and close friends at the Ivy in Chelsea. That evening he returned to A&E.
‘My immune system was so weak from sepsis, I was in and out of A&E multiple times,’ he says. ‘I’ve obviously got good at recognising the signs of infection now. So the moment my heart rate goes up or my blood pressure goes up or I have pains and get a temperature I rush to A&E.
‘It’s funny how you suddenly realise when something like this happens how much you take your health for granted and how trivial things like making a bit more money or doing this or that seem. All you want is your health.’
Sam was filming episode five of Made In Chelsea in which his aunt Lisa Vanderpump, an original cast member of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, was making a guest appearance, when he received a notification on the NHS app that he required a liver transplant.
The couple had just learned from a blood test ten weeks into the pregnancy they were to have a little boy who didn’t carry the congenital hepatic fibrosis gene.
Sam was filming episode five of Made In Chelsea when he received a notification on the NHS app that he required a liver transplant
‘Obviously, I didn’t want a baby to go through what I’ve gone through,’ he says. ‘But then I was realised, it wouldn’t change anything. Imagine if it had changed anything with me. I wouldn’t be here today.
‘At that stage I’d been referred to a new doctor. I knew there was no cure but that they were going to continue to monitor me and react to what happens. Then I received this.’
He shows me a message dated August 21.
‘Dear Samuel Vanderpump,’ he reads. ‘We reviewed your latest CT scan and the findings are keeping well within your known diagnosis…’ He pauses. ‘We feel the best way is for us to organise a liver transplant assessment.
‘That’s how I found out. I broke down. I called my mum, then waited for Alice to come home to tell her. My mum came straight over and we called my nan. That’s the first time she’s crumbled. She was on the phone and she cried. Then I was frantically trying to call the doctor. I said, ‘I’ve just received this letter. What the f*** has happened?’
‘He said I was on his call list that day and thought he’d be able to speak to me before I received the letter but it had been sent electronically more quickly than he thought.
‘I said, ‘I don’t understand. I’m here today. I’m perfectly healthy. I’m running a few kilometres. I’m fine. How can you tell me I need a liver transplant?’
Sam stresses now the importance of context. The senior hepatologist explained that his condition was degenerative. He was concerned that, if the surgery was delayed, he wouldn’t be healthy enough to have a liver transplant in, say, four or five years’ time.
‘My aunt was in the country at the time. So along with my mum and grandma, who’ve been to every single appointment with me since I was four, she came with me and Alice and my brother Jack to the doctor’s office.’
Sam’s close family is a source of wondrous support. He tells me that, if he’s approved for a transplant, it could happen at any time in the next year.
‘It’s a rollercoaster,’ he says. ‘You’d never hope for a liver transplant but now I know I’m going to need one, you hope you’re going to get one. But then there’s other things to factor in like, ‘Do I want it now?’ A life expectancy is hopefully 90 or so which is another 60 years but transplanted livers don’t typically live that long. So while the idea of doing it now is because I’m fit and healthy, at the same time you think, ‘Am I going to have to have a re-transplantation?”
The surgery, he tells me, is 12 hours long.
‘I’m terrified of that,’ he says, adding, ‘And, we’re going to have a new baby on Valentine’s Day.’
You realise, in his private moments, what turmoil Sam faces.
‘A few years ago the biggest thing going on in our lives was gossiping about friends sleeping with other friends. I envy that guy now. I’d love to get back to that. But, right now, we’ve got to focus on what we’ve got at hand.’ He falls silent.
Alice pulls herself up from the cushion and runs a hand over her baby bump.
‘We’ll just work it out as we go along,’ she says. ‘We’re not pre-planners. My family’s very supportive. Your family is very supportive. I think you know we’ll all be fine.’
