Personal Health

Flesh-eating bacteria: a doctor sends a Patient back home

Chris Gordon discovers a seemingly harmless bump on the Arm. As he goes to the doctor, diagnosed it a bursitis and sent him home. A few hours later, he is fighting against death.

As Chris Gordon noted in March 2017 a small scratch on the Hand, he gives the incident initially little attention. “I didn’t think anything of it,” he recalls in a report to be submitted to the Mayo clinic in Minnesota, his case has. “I went back into the house, cleaned the scratches as best I could and began my Job as an Online teacher”.

A few days later, as he visits because of a painful bump on the right Arm of his doctor, he no Worries. After a short investigation of these sent to him with the diagnosis of bursitis home.

However, within a very short time, the bump swells. She is getting bigger and more painful. Gordon feels lethargic and dizzy. Because the pain will be harder and harder, driving his wife to a local hospital.

Flesh-Eating Bacteria

Once there, is infected his body with severe Sepsis. Quickly the Doctors act and put him in a special clinic. The diagnosis: necrotizing fasciitis. Flesh-eating bacteria had spread in his body and the surrounding tissue is infected. For the treating physician, Mark Morrey of the Mayo clinic, is fast: “We had to be aggressive and get him in the operating room bring in, or else he would have died.”

In the case of several operations, the Doctors remove the affected skin and muscle areas in order to stop the bacteria from spreading all over the body. "When I came to the clinic, had weggefressen&quot the bacteria all the skin on my right Arm up to my Hand;, Gordon says in the report of the Mayo clinic. “And on my Hand, which apparently was the original entry point for the bacteria, they had eaten up to my tendon down. All the skin on my right Arm, my right shoulder, which is the largest part of the right side of my chest and the right side of my back was gone.“ Instagram/gordoncdt Chris Gordon has the nearly fatal infection with flesh-eating bacteria survived.

Necrotizing Fasciitis

In the case of a necrotizing fasciitis is a bacterial skin infection that spreads rapidly in the body and infected tissue in the shortest amount of time kills. The so-called flesh-eating bacteria are very rare, but extremely dangerous – one in four people die from it. If left untreated, the disease leads within the shortest time to death.

Patients have frequent symptoms, such as red skin, swollen body and severe pain. They occur shortly after an injury and worsen within a few hours or days. People who have a weakened immune system or severe chronic diseases such as Diabetes, belong to the risk group. Most common cause of wounds or operations.

The bacteria can only be due to surgical interventions stopped. Affected areas of the skin and tissue must be meticulously removed, often to the bone. In many cases, only Amputation helps.

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Numerous Operations

65 days Chris Gordon spends in the hospital. However, as the bacterium is finally defeated, his Doctors before the next challenge: Almost half of the skin of his upper body they had to remove during the surgery. So Gordon can fully recover, you need to cover the Doctors in the affected areas as quickly as possible with the skin. Ultimately, you have to reconstruct the affected part of the body with numerous skin grafts.

Gordon has survived the life-threatening disease. This is now two years. Subsequently, he fought his way through eight months of physical therapy, numerous doctor appointments and hospital visits. Of the Sport and his family helped him find a way back to life. “Basically, I can now do everything I could do before,” says the passionate athlete.