Tracey Whiteside “burst into tears” when she finally picked up the keys for her new council home in Paisley earlier this month.

The 48-year-old, who currently shares a first-floor tenement flat in Linwood with her husband and 14-year-old daughter, has been on the waiting list since November 2019 after health conditions which cause severe pain in her legs left her relying on a wheelchair which did not fit through the flat’s bathroom doorway.

They are among the families caught up in Scotland's dire shortage of social housing.

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The situation became intolerable in August 2020 after Mrs Whiteside's left leg was amputated below the knee, and – unable to be fitted for a prosthetic due to ulcers – she found herself forced to crawl up and down the “filthy” tenement stairs to get to and from the family’s home.

"I was sort of bum shuffling on the stairs until I dislocated my shoulder doing it and fractured my collar bone,” said Mrs Whiteside, a former photographer.

“Then I had to resort to crawling on my hands and knees going up and down them."

At times, the stairway was littered with discarded needles and smelled of urine.

At the beginning of May this year, Mrs Whiteside believes she contracted an infection from the unsanitary conditions in the close.

She said: "I had a little cut in my right hand. I didn't think anything of it, but I had obviously been crawling up and down the stairs and I ended up getting this rash on my arm and it started spreading so that I had it on both arms, and then I had it on my legs.

“I went to the doctor and she said ‘I'd like you to go to the hospital - I think you need IV antibiotics’.

“They kept me in, and I was there for two weeks. It was Staphylococcus [aureus, a bacterial infection].

“They could tell it had come from this cut in my hand because they could see how bad my hand was round about the cut – it hadn’t healed properly.

“My kidneys started failing, my liver started failing, I had problems with my pancreas, and they started talking about sepsis, but they had me on strong antibiotics and luckily they worked.”

Tracey Whiteside has been receiving support from Finding Your Feet, the amputees charity set up by sepsis survivor Cor Hutton (left)Tracey Whiteside has been receiving support from Finding Your Feet, the amputees charity set up by sepsis survivor Cor Hutton (left) (Image: Gordon Terris/Herald&Times)

At the end of June, doctors told Mrs Whiteside that it is likely she will also need to have her right leg amputated due to damage in the joints.

However, Mrs Whiteside – who volunteers with the limb loss charity, Finding Your Feet, and is a member of the Children’s Panel – said she feared that this would leave her trapped at home.

She said: “I’m supposed to be housebound. The physio in the hospital told me ‘don’t be going out, the stairs are just too dangerous for you now’, but I’m 48 – I’ve got things to do, I can’t be housebound.

“So it was agreed for the moment not to do anything about the right leg."

On July 2, Mrs Whiteside and her husband - who has recovered from multiple strokes - were finally offered a ground floor council flat in Paisley.

They expect to complete the move by the end of this month.

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She said: "I burst into tears signing for the house, because I thought 'this is going to make such a difference to my life'.

"It was perfect. There's a ramp outside and I'll be able to get an electric wheelchair so that I can get out and about to the shops on my own, which I haven't been able to do for four and a half years. 

"It'll never change my physical health, but the change it's going to have to my mental health is going to be huge - I can't begin to imagine.

"I've made attempts on my life, I have self-harmed, all because of the toll this has taken on my mental health.

"If it wasn't for the support I've had from my family and Finding Your Feet, I wouldn't be here."