An Annapolis woman wants to warn people on the Chesapeake Bay about the danger of a little-known flesh-eating bacteria, as doctors work to save her husband’s leg. What started as a cut on the shin from a fish trap quickly cost the man nearly all of the tissue on the front and back of one leg.
The couple, who has asked not to be identified for privacy reasons, lives in the Oyster Harbor community just outside of Annapolis. The man was on his pier on Sunday, July 6, at an inlet that leads to the Chesapeake Bay. He was checking a small trap that he uses to catch bait fish when he cut his shin on the trap. The trap had only been in the water since the previous evening, his wife tells us, and looked clean. He wiped off the cut, she got him a band-aid that fully covered it, and he went about his day.
By Monday, the man noticed his cut was starting to get infected. He went to Patient First for antibiotics, but after another day passed, the infection had gotten worse. “It was huge and painful, and looked really bizarre,” his wife tells us. He went to the emergency room, where he immediately received antibiotics by IV, but it wasn’t enough. The bacteria was cultured and found to be Aeromonas hydrophila, an antibiotic-resistant necrotizing fasciitis (commonly known as flesh-eating bacteria). After surgery to try and remove all of the diseased tissue, the bacteria was found to have spread to the man’s entire leg. The hospital recommended transferring him to a more specialized medical center: Shock Trauma in Baltimore.
Dr. Sharon Henry, Director of the Division of Wound Healing and Metabolism of R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center at the University of Maryland Medical Center, has been treating serious tissue damage at Shock Trauma for more than two decades. The center has state-of-the-art capabilities to heal, regrow, and graft some of the worst soft-tissue wounds. Their hyperbaric oxygen treatments draw patients to the center from all over the mid-Atlantic region. About 85 percent of them come for specialized care after contracting flesh-eating bacteria like Aeromonas or the better-known Vibrio vulnificus…