Positivity: ‘Batman’ deemed a medical miracle
September 18, 2007 6:00 AM
Andy Eaton, 39, of Seabrook, is the second known person to have survived rabies.This is according to Andy and his wife, Rhonda, who say even though tests came back negative from the Centers for Disease Control, the diagnosis written on the doctor’s slip simply states, “rabies.”
Doctors got tired of calling it, “suspected rabies,” Rhonda said. Half were convinced that’s what he had, she said. The other half said it was encephalitis.
The family believes rabies fits all of Andy’s symptoms.
“Some people don’t believe it, there’s lots and lots of stories going around,” said Rhonda. “Every test for rabies is inconclusive, except one: autopsy.”
Eaton’s doctors at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center could not be reached for comment. They put him in an induced coma and treated him with a cocktail of drugs that had saved the life of a 15-year-old Wisconsin girl, the first known survivor of rabies.
Eaton came home to Folly Mill Terrace in July. He is thin and weak, and still wears a trichotomy tube to breathe, but he is talking, walking and glad to be alive.
“He’s like a kid who wakes up every morning for Christmas,” said Rhonda. “He’s very Zen. He doesn’t sweat the small stuff.”
His prognosis? Full recovery, she said.
Andy’s ordeal began last December while on a roofing job in Merrimac, Mass. He reached his hand inside of the roof and got stung by a bee, he thought. Andy’s been bitten by bees before, said Rhonda. It didn’t make his hand and arm swell up the way it did after this bite, she said. The family thought no more about it.
Three months later, Andy started feeling ill. He went to two area hospitals where doctors thought it might be pneumonia, or a drug addiction, said Rhonda. They kept sending him home and Andy got sicker.
Eaton ended up in the intensive care unit of Massachusetts General Hospital. He had the classic signs of rabies, including paranoia and frothing at the mouth.
“We kept going back to the emergency room,” said Rhonda. “The doctors couldn’t understand why he was frothing, he couldn’t swallow.”
Finally, she said, “a doctor came up and said, has your husband ever been bitten by a bat? That’s when they started saying, this looks like rabies.”
The family began putting the pieces of the puzzle together. Everything fit. Rhonda talked to Andy’s co-workers on the roofing job and learned there had been numerous bats flying around. …..
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