Sandy Wilson’s 5 year long fight with the flesh-eating bacteria
Sandy Wilson woke up one day to find out that she was a patient in one of the hospitals where she was working as a nurse. She remembered having a baby, and being told she had gotten an infection.
The infection was called the flesh-eating bacteria, and was eating her alive. This is the most feared infection from the entire medical world and usually infects people with a weak immune system, like the obese people, diabetics, cancer patients or transplant recipients. It is deadly in about 20 percent of the cases and horribly disfigures its victims. The doctors used to believe that it is caused exclusively by one type of strep bacteria, but now it seems that drug resistant germs, like the staph germ MRSA are able to produce flesh-eating toxins and cause huge infections. Dr. Alan Bisno, a retired University of Miami expert who has lectured other doctors on this horrible disease, says that a few decades ago there were very few cases of flesh-eating bacteria infections, but now it seems that their number is increasing heavily. The doctors try and treat it by cutting away the dead tissue, but very often the infection is more advanced and they have to cut more and more in order to save the patient’s life. Sandy Wilson lost her spleen, gall bladder, appendix, a part of her stomach and all of her intestines. The 34 years old woman is suffering from this horrible disease since five years ago and had countless surgeries, including some unusual organ transplant. Much of this five years period she lived in hospitals and rehabilitation centers, and her life fell apart: she is not able to spend very much time with her son and she eventually lost her marriage, not to mention the utmost pain she had to endure all this time. No one is able to say how Wilson contacted the flesh-eating bacteria, necrotizing fasciitis by its medical name, but it all began after her five years old son was born by cesarean section on the 1st of April 2005. She had a problem related to the clotting of the blood and had to receive blood which was probably pooled from hundreds of donors. After several weeks, she went home, but she had to come back after a few days because she had a problem related to her C-section surgery, so she went to the emergency section from an Annapolis hospital and was immediately rushed into surgery, but the doctors did not treat her there when they realized what was the disease that she was suffering from. She was sent to Baltimore’s Shock Trauma Center, part of the University Of Maryland Medical Center, which is specialized in the life-threatening cases, and where Wilson used to work as a pediatric emergency nurse. Dr. Thomas Scalea, Shock Trauma’s physician-in-chief, says that she was in a very bad condition when she arrived there, and the fact that she only had a baby a few weeks ago made it harder.
Wilson was kept sedated for about two weeks, while surgeons cut away rotten tissue from her body and drained vile fluid. Dr. Thomas Scalea said that he had operated on her about 40, 50 times, and every time realized that they had not cut enough. After they managed to keep her stable they gathered around her the whole family and tried to give her the news, but she was not able at first to understand what was going on and thought that her son was dead, and the emotional distress made her reluctant to the medical care she received. After a few months the doctor believed that she was ok and allowed her being discharged from the rehabilitation hospital, but she fell ill again and doctors found out that she had developed fistulas (holes in her bowel that let its contents leak out to her skin). So she was back for the next two years in Shock Trauma and rehab hospital while doctors tried to fix her. But her health got worse, and, by December 2006, she had left only a few inches of her small intestine and she developed liver problems, so the sole solution was a small bowel transplant which was risky because it carries a higher risk of rejection than many other types of transplant. Dr. Cal Matsumoto operated on her at Georgetown University Medical Center, and had to remove all the diseased bowel and abdominal tissue, a very tough surgery that kept Wilson on the breathing machine for four weeks. The transplant was made on December 2007 and seemed a huge success, and one month later she was able to eat her first meal since May 2005: lasagna, zucchini, salad and cake. But since she had not eaten solid food in 2 years and a half, she got peritonitis and had to go back on tube feeding. Unfortunately the stress and the ordeal caused her marriage to fall apart in 2009. Wilson was sent home for good at the end of January 2008, and has been hospitalized a few times since then because she developed fever and the doctors needed to make sure that it was not a sign of organ rejection. She will have to take immune-suppressing drugs for the rest of her life, and her belly is filled with scars, but she enjoys having a normal life and spending time with her son. Her goal is to return back to work, if possible in the same hospital where she worked and was a patient too.
