Man given 10% chance of survival after contracting flesh-eating disease from scratch
A man developed necrosis after vacationing in the Bahamas, with a flesh-eating bacterium having entered his body.
Brian Roush, 62, spent his New Year with his girlfriend, Tonia Buford Stinson, and decided to celebrate their big milestone of moving in together, with a trip of a lifetime.
The Florida man, however, couldn’t have known that his life would be in jeopardy after he tripped and scraped his ankle.
His daughter, Brittany Roush, told WFLA that his injury was only small, and didn’t ruin his swimming with pigs and waterslide activities.
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But as he was traveling home to Fort Lauderdale on January 3, ‘he became violently ill’.
A GoFundMe page set up to help with his time spent in the hospital, revealed that he ended up being admitted to a local hospital with ‘severe septic shock’, where he ‘was intubated, and placed on a ventilator’.
Brittany told WFLA, that whilst in the emergency room, ‘his ankle erupted into blisters’, leading doctors to suspect necrotizing fasciitis, aka, a flesh-eating disease.
This causes skin tissue to die and adopt a dead and blackened appearance.
According to the Cleveland Clinic, ‘it affects about 1 in every 250,000 people in the United States’ and can be caused by scrapes, cuts, insect bites and more.
Necrotizing fasciitis is a rare medical condition, which occurs when the tissue dies, and circulation stops pumping through the area.
Symptoms include the area swelling, blistering, getting a fever and becoming dizzy.
Because of the big change it has made to his life, the GoFundMe states ‘he will be unable to work for at least the next 3 months, and while he is fortunate enough to have health insurance and short and long term disability coverage, it won't be enough to cover everything that's piling up'.
Even though he was taken to surgery to remove the dead tissue, the ‘sepsis was wreaking havoc’.
The GoFundMe said: “Brian’s liver, kidneys, and lungs failed while he was in septic shock and he was placed in an induced coma on life support. His ankle became gangrenous, and most of the flesh from his ankle to his lower calf had to be removed down to the bone.”
Because of his poor condition, doctors had given him a 10 per cent chance of surviving.
However, he made a surprising recovery.
The charity page claimed he was ‘miraculously’ better ‘after a week of nonstop antibiotics and life support,’ where he ‘cleared the infection and his lungs and liver began to recover’.
But the battle isn’t over.
Roush needs to re-learn how to walk and stay admitted for long-term care.
“He is doing his best to maintain a positive attitude despite waking up to this nightmare,” the GoFundMe explains.
Britt Jones