Woman wakes up from coma to discover arms and legs amputated due to infection from dog saliva

An Ohio woman woke up from a 10-day coma to find her arms and legs partially amputated due to an infection from her dogs’s saliva, WJW reports.

Marie Trainer and her husband, Matthew, of Canton, recently returned from a vacation to the Caribbean, when she suddenly began to feel nauseous and suffer from backaches. The two originally thought that she had the flu until her temperature jumped and dropped.

“Her temperature went up then went down to about 93 degrees,” Matthew recalled. “That’s when we rushed her to the hospital.”

Although medical staff at Aultman Hospital put Marie through aggressive treatments, she reportedly developed sepsis — a potentially life-threatening condition characterized by an unusually high heart and breathing rates — within hours.

“We were getting new symptoms and worsening symptoms very rapidly,” said Gina Premier, Marie’s step-daughter and a nurse practitioner at the hospital where Marie was treated.

Doctors were soon forced to place Marie into a medically induced coma after her limbs started to decompose, Premier explained. Blood tests later confirmed that the woman had Capnocytophaga, a type of bacteria found in the saliva of dogs and some cats.

“Fairly common in the oral flora or the mouth of a dog and it can be transmitted through a bite or sometimes just contact with saliva,” Margaret Kobe, medical director of infectious diseases at Aultman, told WJW. “That organism is very virulent. It has the ability to induce your immune system to do some pretty horrible things.”

Even though hospital staff purportedly tried to save Marie’s arms and legs from gangrene by removing multiple blood clots, they made little progress. Marie woke up from her coma 10 days later to find her limbs partially amputated.

“When I opened my eyes, I didn’t know where I was,” she said. “It was very hard to find out that they had to remove my legs and my arms … very hard to cope with.”

Both Marie and her husband suspect that their two dogs may have accidentally licked a scrape on her arm, which led to the necessary amputation. Still, the couple has no plans to get rid of their pets.

“I’m still amazed at what it is,” they said. “We still love our animals.”

The couple’s friends and family have since started a GoFundMe campaign to help cover Marie’s medical expenses.

“Marie has gone through 6 surgeries to date and is over sixty days into this hospitalization & the fight of her life,” the campaign description reads. “We are all hopeful that this will be that last surgery so that she can move forward with rehab and recovery.”

source: yahoo.com