The Daily, May 22 2016
The doctors say it lives on your skin, waiting for an opening. They say once it gets inside, your fate comes down to a dice roll. It doesn’t always turn your guts to slurry; sometimes you get off with a sore throat, sometimes it doesn’t do anything at all. They might even admit that it doesn’t always need an open wound. People have been known to sicken and die from a bruise, from a bump against the door.
What they won’t generally tell you is that you can get it by following doctor’s orders. Which is how I ended up in ICU, staring through a morphine haze into a face whose concerned expression must have been at least 57% fear of litigation. I didn’t get flesh-eating disease from a door or a zip-line. I got it from a dual-punch biopsy—which is to say, from being stabbed with a pair of needles the size of narwhal tusks. There was this lesion on my leg, you see. They needed a closer look. And there was Mr. Strep, waiting on my skin for new frontiers to conquer.
Reality comes with disclaimers. You’re never sure in hindsight what actually happened, what didn’t, what composite remnants your brain might have stitched together for dramatic purposes. I remember waking embedded in gelatin, in an OR lined with egg cartons; I’m pretty sure that was a hallucination. I remember my brother’s voice on a cell-phone between operations, mocking my position on Global Warming. (That might sound like a hallucination too, but only if you didn’t know my brother.) I’m pretty sure the ICU nurse was real, the one who stood bedside as I lay dying and said “You’re an author? I’m working on a book myself, you know; maybe if you happen to pull through . . .”
At least one memory is fact beyond doubt. My partner Caitlin confirmed it; the surgeon repeated it; even now I turn it over daily in my head like some kind of black-hearted anti-affirmation: “Two more hours and you’d be dead.”
Two hours? I was in the waiting room longer than that.
It was fourteen hours from Of course it hurts they just punched two holes in your leg to shakes and vomiting and self-recrimination: Come on, you’re a big tough field biologist. Back on Snake Island you cut a sebaceous cyst out of your own scrotum with a rusty razor blade and a bottle of rubbing alcohol. I remember drifting away to the thought that this was just some nasty 24-hour thing, that I was bound to feel better in the morning. Caitlin kept me awake; she kept me alive. Together we improvised a sling out of old jeans so I could hop to the cab without screaming.
Twelve hours as a succession of whitecoats said cellulitis and nothing serious and Wait, was it oozing those black bubbles an hour ago? I crashed somewhere in there: one moment chatting bravely with friends and caregivers, the next staring into the light while nurses slapped my face and strapped an Alien facehugger across my mouth. I don’t know how many instants passed in the black space between.
They strip-mined the rot from my leg just past midnight. They had to go in twice. All told, it was forty hours from First Contact to Death’s Door; forty-two and you wouldn’t be reading this. I spent weeks with an Australia-sized crater in my calf, watched muscles slide like meaty pistons every time we changed the dressings. To a biologist and science-fiction writer, though, that was cool. I blogged; I spelunked my leg with sporks and Q-tips, took pictures, impressed nurses and inspired half of Reddit to lose its lunch. Eventually they scraped a strip off my thigh with a cheese-grater, stapled it across the hole, told me not to worry about the rotten-fish smell wafting from the wound. I’ve got a huge vagina-shaped scar on my leg but I still have that leg—and just six months after some vicious microbe turned its insides into chunky beef stew, I was back to running nine miles.
I wasn’t lucky. None of we flesh-eaten are lucky. But next to those who’ve lost arms and legs, lives and loved ones to this ravenous monster—a scar is nothing. It’s a memento. It’s free beers courtesy of the easily-impressed.
Not lucky. But I’ve got to be one of the least unlucky bastards alive.
