Following up on my 7/20 posting “Bad history”, the terrible tale of necrotizing fasciitis (caused by MRSA) in 2003 — now with details that have come out through discussions on Facebook (FB still works, but you have to delete most of the stuff that comes your way to get to actual postings by real friends). Material from these discussions, edited and amplified.
Maggie Tallerman (in the UK) opened the exchanges:
— MT > AZ: You didn’t say if the MRSA was a hospital-acquired bug, which is known for being a thing in this country (hopefully uncommon). I hope it wasn’t. Appalling.
— AZ > MT: It definitely was not. Probably acquired through garden soil — unexpected perils of being a gardener! — though that’s not sure. Not from a hospital or through sexual contact, in any case, since both were absent from my life between June 2003, when my man Jacques died, and November, when the NF suddenly appeared. It is, however, likely that my immune responses were muted by extravagant grief (and, before that, the toll of dementia caregiving).
In a sense I survived through the diagnostic skills of my family doctor, who reckoned, in a phone call, that there were three things that might be the cause of the symptoms that had suddenly appeared, that one was very rare but extremely dangerous, so just in case I had to meet him at Stanford Hospital immediately (and was delivered there by my department’s administrator). Within an hour I was in surgery, and so my life was saved.
