My dog scratch turned to sepsis
A minor scratch from his dog led to Jaco losing his legs, fingers and the tip of his nose
HE THOUGHT nothing of it when it happened. It was just a tiny scratch on his hand that he’d got while playing with his dog in the park. Jaco Nel didn’t take it personally – he knew it was an accident and that his beloved pooch, Harvey, had just got a bit carried away.
As soon as they got home he cleaned the wound then forgot all about it. Little did he know the tiny nick would cause him to lose both his legs, most of his fingers and the tip of his nose.
Two weeks after sustaining the scratch he started feeling tired and achy. Jaco thought he’d just picked up a nasty case of flu and put himself to bed. But when his life partner, Michael, arrived home and saw what a bad state he was in he called the paramedics.
By this stage Jaco’s body was covered in red blotches – a sign that he was in septic shock – and he was incapable of moving.
When he was admitted to intensive care, doctors gave him a 20% chance of survival.
They were initially baffled and couldn’t figure out what could have caused the infection. But after running blood and urine tests they had a question for Jaco, a South African psychiatrist who’s lived in Manchester, England, for the past 17 years.
“They asked me if I had a dog,” he recalls.
When he told them “yes” they wanted to know if his cocker spaniel, Harvey, had ever scratched or bitten him.
Jaco (now 52) immediately recalled the
incident in the park three weeks earlier in October 2016.
And with that recollection the mystery was solved. It turned out the reason he was so terribly ill was because his body had become infected by deadly bacteria, Capnocytophaga canimorsus, his dog had been harbouring in his saliva.
But even with the cause of his illness finally known, a long and painful road still stretched ahead for Jaco.
He had to spend four months in hospital, hooked up to a drip, receiving superstrength antibiotics to make sure the infection was removed completely from his system.
And while he lay there he was painfully aware that something even worse lay ahead for him.
“I was lying there in hospital looking at my black, gangrenous legs and fingers. Looking down, I knew I was going to lose everything.
“I could tell the tissue was dead. Even though the doctors had played it down, I knew how severe it was.”
AFTER the infection had cleared up doctors had to amputate both his legs below the knee. They also had to remove all the fingers on his right hand at the middle joint and one on his left. The gangrene had even spread to his face, causing him eventually to lose the tip of his nose and sustain damage to his top lip and left ear.
For Jaco, living with the facial disfigurement was much more of a challenge than adapting to the loss of his legs and learning to walk from scratch, using his new prosthetic limbs.
“I’m very reluctant to go out because I’m so self-conscious,” he says. “The hardest part has been accepting that I’m now disfigured and that there’s nothing I can do about it.”
More than 18 months down the line he’s still dumbstruck at how a seemingly innocuous scratch could have caused so much devastation to his life.
Jaco, who specialised in helping dementia patients, was off from work until January this year.
Meanwhile he and Michael split up because their relationship couldn’t survive the trauma of what had happened to him.
One of the many difficult decisions they had to make as a couple was to have Harvey put down.
“Luckily he was an older dog and was coming to the end of his life. But it was very sad” Jaco says.
“We were worried about him infecting someone else. The dog doesn’t need to bite for that to happen. It can just be passed on through his saliva. What if he’d infected a child? It could have been terrible.”
Jaco says although he knew it was just bad luck that Harvey had picked up the bacteria and passed it on to him, he couldn’t help feeling resentful towards the dog. “There were times when I was very angry and I blamed him.”
But it’s not all gloom and doom. Jaco says what he’s gone through has made him a better doctor who’s capable of treating his patients with empathy and understanding.
“I know what it’s like to be close to death and to have a disability,” he says. “I’ve realised I have a lot of inner strength because of what I’ve been through. There’s something in me that I need to share and help people.”
It’s for this reason that almost two years after his life-changing ordeal he’s speaking out about what happened to him.
“I hope to eventually show people it’s possible to overcome so much in life,” he says.
‘I could tell the tissue was dead. Even though the doctors played it down, I knew how severe it was’