Positivity: Mother’s strong spirit pulls her through bout with deadly bacteria

From South Bend and Mishawaka, Indiana:

Article published Jun 15, 2008

‘She’s a miracle’

Seated on the large L-shaped sofa between her wheelchair and the husband who saw her nearly die, Kim McClellan calls out for her prosthetic fingers.

One of her 9-year-old twins, Sieanna, scurries off, knowing exactly where the digits are. The girl returns with Kim’s Ziploc bag of fingers.

Kim plants one of them on a stub where the natural finger once was. The fake is stiff and straight. It feels awkward. She’s tried typing on the computer with them, hoping it would be the first step to working again, but it’s just a two-finger peck.

Same goes for both prosthetic legs. She hasn’t found her balance — yet.Deep inside her a fire smolders, a desire to overcome the amputations and reclaim the life she and her husband, Brent, had built before March 2007, when Group A Streptococcus slipped under her skin. The ferocious bacteria did its best to kill her, nearly shutting down her organs and turning her skin blue as a corpse.

“She’s a miracle, that she’s even alive,” says Dr. Janet Galanes, who has seen her for about nine years as her physician and, since the trauma, as her cheerleading friend. “She only got through that because of her will to live. … She had things to live for.”

Kim can see the other twin, the boy Nyle, outside next to their above-ground pool where he has just tossed his ball over the fence in their subdivision of spacious homes.

The big chocolate Lab, Chewy, stares inside with sad round eyes. Ever since she’s been sick, she says, his potty habits have been off, “like he was emotionally traumatized.”

And around Kim are the walls that she and Brent painted blue, embedded with crystals that sparkle at night like stars for dreaming.Kim can’t see the reason for the ordeal that led to 13 surgeries but feels there must be one.

“You’ve got to go through misery sometimes to find something better,” says Kim, a big believer in fate. “I went through a divorce and thought, ‘How am I going to get through this?’ Then I met Brent.”

Their 10th anniversary May 10 was like most days. Kim slept through most of it. Kim says she lingers in bed because of pains that still grip her.

Brent’s hands are tough and lined with black creases from maintaining machines at Steel Warehouse, where he works seven days a week to make up for the full-time job Kim can no longer hold. She’d sold vibrating and abrasive products to factories until her illness.

On their anniversary, he came home from work and waited patiently for Kim to wake up. No major plans. They don’t plan much because the way Kim feels is so unpredictable. She doesn’t leave the house except for medical appointments.The momma cat, Maxi, and one of their other cats spend more time than anyone with Kim, nestled beside her on the bed.

“They lay in there with me,” Kim says, smiling. “I pet them. They purr.”

Maxi was born two days after Kim came home from her three-month stay in Saint Joseph Regional Medical Center.

Kim’s horror story began with flu-like symptoms in March 2007. Her body ached, and it grew worse day by day — so bad that, by the time she made it to Galanes’ office, she couldn’t stand on her own. Galanes immediately ordered an ambulance. When Kim arrived at the emergency room, her blood pressure had dropped so fast that she was in critical condition. The ER staff plugged her into a ventilator and countless IVs, rushing all of her body’s resources to save her heart, lungs and brain.

Her extremities would suffer.That nasty Strep had become “flesh-eating bacteria,” the nickname for necrotizing fasciitis. Once Strep dives from its usual home — in the nasal cavities or on the skin — into the blood, the bacteria thrives under the linings of the muscles, giving off toxins that kill the neighboring cells. So blood vessels die.

All it takes is one pinprick in the skin for the bacteria to enter the blood. But there have been cases where the age-old strain of bacteria has mysteriously appeared in the blood with no sign of skin cuts, says Dr. Robert N. Hunt, an infectious disease physician in South Bend.

Kim says she may have gotten it from a body waxing, which removes hair follicles. Hunt says you can never know for sure.

Surgeons eventually amputated Kim’s withered, dead fingers, then her legs below her knees. They did a root canal on her teeth, where blood flow also weakened.

“You just do it because you have no choice,” she says, reflecting on everything she had to face. …..

Go here for the rest of the story.