Woman loses half her body to sepsis
Shan lost half her body to a sudden infection but she’s managed to take positives from her ordeal
By PIETER VAN ZYL Pictures: MISHA JORDAAN
ALMOST overnight her life changed forever. A sepsis infection came out of nowhere, forcing surgeons to slice away at her face and body in a bid to halt the bacteria raging through her body and devouring her from the inside out. Thirteen operations and 25 procedures later and Shaninlea Visser is very different to the woman she once was.
Wheelchair-bound and disfigured, she’s suffered devastating trauma and has to relearn to do everything.
You’d expect her to fall apart after such an experience – but not Shan. “I don’t want people to think, ‘Ag shame, poor woman’,” the mom of one says.
And within moments of meeting her, pity is the last thing you feel – instead the overwhelming impression is of a brave woman full of hope, speaking candidly about her terrifying brush with death.
Her ordeal has even had a positive outcome, she says: her once-crumbling marriage is on the mend.
She’s dyed her hair because “a little colour adds light to life,” she says as sunlight fills her room at the rehabilitation unit of Nurture Aurora Hospital in Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape. She’s been here since 23 March, working to piece what’s left of her body back together.
THIS year got off to a bad start for Shan (34). She and her husband, Anthony (43), had separated and divorce was on the cards. She moved to PE from Durban on 5 January to open a new office for the transport logistics company she worked for.
Less than two weeks later she suddenly felt ill and lost consciousness in the bathroom. By the next morning she couldn’t get out of bed. At about 2.30 pm she got up for a drink of water but passed out again.
A colleague who’d come by to see how she was rushed her to hospital.
“My hands and feet felt like they were on fire but when the nurse touched them she said they were freezing.”
Blood had already started withdrawing from her extremities and she slipped into a two-week coma. When she finally emerged the doctor said, “Welcome back” – and she realised how gravely ill she was.
Shan remembers almost nothing of the month she was in intensive care and her dad, David Rogers, kept a journal to help her fill in the blanks.
“At first we thought she had a stomach virus,” says David, a retired director of an environmental services company who lives in Langebaan in the Western Cape.
“But within days it was clear she was fighting for her life. Her kidneys started
shutting down,” he says of his only child.
At times they thought they were losing her. “But I never lost hope. The doctors postponed the amputations for as long as possible, thinking she’d perhaps only lose her fingertips and toes,” David says.
Yet the necrosis kept spreading and doctors eventually delivered the blunt news. “They said, ‘You’ll have to lose both hands and feet or you’re not going to make it’,” Shan recalls.
All she could think of was her 11-yearold daughter, Kiaralea, and how she needed her mom.
“I told them, ‘Do what you have to do’.”
ON 6 February surgeons got down to their grim work. First Shan’s lower legs were amputated; her arms went two days later. By this stage the infection had spread to her face, and her nose and the inside of her mouth were black. Doctors removed her nose, her lips and part of her tongue.
Her teeth also sustained damage – the nerves in six teeth along her top jaw and several along the bottom died, as well as the gumline holding these teeth.
“At a later stage after all the plastic surgery has taken place a procedure will be undertaken to replace the gumline and teeth,” David says.
The first in a series of plastic surgeries started on 17 February. Surgeons harvested skin from her right thigh and removed a piece of her rib to reconstruct her nose.
Because her lips had to be removed, her mouth opening shrank and she could be fed only via a straw. Her mouth has now been surgically widened so she can eat with a spoon.
A few reminders of her former life remain. On the stump of her left wrist is a slightly distorted tattoo of the infinity symbol. Her other tattoos – the Aries star sign and butterfly wings on her left leg, the ladybird on her right foot – are gone, along with the limbs they once adorned.
Humour has helped carry her through. Just a few days ago she shared a joke with a friend, “If we get into trouble, how will the police cuff me? I don’t have fingerprints any more!”
Shan has had to relearn how to sit unassisted and to dress and feed herself.
“The sooner I learn these things the sooner I can go home,” she says. “I miss my husband and daughter.”
Kiaralea, who’s in Grade 5, is being cared for by Anthony, a fitter at a sugar mill in Sezela south of Durban.
Anthony has visited Shan in hospital and they’ve realised they still care for and need each other.
“I’m so thankful for Anthony,” Shan says. “I might be half a woman but in my head I’m not. Other men might see it as a reason to leave but we’ve grown closer.”
She gestures towards her cupboard adorned with a piece of paper. On it she wrote down her diagnosis in a scrawl with the help of a special attachment to her stump made by her dad.
“Disseminated intervascular coagulation caused by bacteria,” it reads.
The speed with which she types messages on her phone with a stylus is equally impressive. “My dad also made me special cuffs with a knife, fork or spoon attached so I can eat,” she adds.
During our conversation, prosthetist Ruan Lundt arrives to measure Shan for artificial legs. Also on the agenda are robotic hands. Shan is determined she’ll walk and even drive her car again. “I’m not going to hide indoors forever.”
Doctors have been unable to determine the cause of the sepsis and there are several more medical procedures ahead. But Shan is heeding her dad’s advice: no space for negativity.
If you’d like to help Shan on her journey, email Rob Nicholson at Robdtm@ vodamail.co.za.
‘The sooner I learn these things the sooner I can go home’
Shan with her husband, Anthony, and their daughter, Kiaralea.