Very Scary Disease Story! What The Hell Is This?!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Yes, this is a true story just told to me by my cousin in Illinois.

A 69 year old local farmer who has no cattle, just grain fields, and has not been out of the local farming community on any exotic vacations, woke up last Thursday and had a tingling feel in his legs and they were slightly swollen.

So Thursday he goes to the local Quick Care and they checked him over and gave him some antibiotics, sent him home and said, “If it doesn’t get any better by tomorrow, go to the hospital.”

Friday morning he woke up and his legs were even more swollen and it was hard to stand so they took him to the local hospital. The doctors took blood work and while they were waiting for results, his legs started to swell so large, so fast, it was splitting the skin open!

The son called an ambulance and they drove him to Peoria (the next largest specialty hospital) and by Friday afternoon they had had to amputate one of his legs and were thinking of amputating the other. Also, his kidney and liver were starting to fail.

By Saturday morning he died. A total of about 36 hours from the first sign of the disease.

According to my cousin, there was no diagnosis made and his blood work and skin samples were sent to the Center for Disease Control.

No, there is no cite that I can link for this incident - and yes, you could possibly say this is all just local gossip - except that my cousin knows the man, and my cousin also worked for the country emergency center for decades and got this all from the official reports that have been sent to his colleagues. There is no coroners report available yet, and as he died in a different county, most likely my cousin will not be able to see that. Needless to say the community is a bit on edge.

I have no idea if this has anything to do with those other recent cases of flesh eating disease by those other patients, but wow - scary shit! And again - this is just a local farmer who was working his Illinois fields and had not gone on any exotic travels.

2

There is not a single mention of this in Google News.

3

I know. My cousin said it will most likely only be a small obituary, without specifics, in the local paper.

I have since Googled like crazy to see if I can find anything else like this. I did note that swelling of the legs comes from a heart condition, or an extreme allergy to something like peanuts or latex, but I didn’t find any “normal” diseases that progressed that rapidly and to the point of skin breaking during that rapid of swelling.

Who knows - perhaps this is one of those rare, but not unheard of, side symptoms of a heart attack or other normal event for a 69 year old man. Still, he does know that the hospital performed those tests and nothing seemed normal about it at the time. Plus sending blood work and skin samples to the CDC does at least sound like some professionals were stumped at this rapid progression leading to the mans death.

4

This is an autopsy that’s going to take weeks.

In my experience from my newspaper reporting days they’ll call it something generic like “a virus” if it is something that would scare the town/city/state.

I covered a story of a 6yo who was sent home from the clinic with a “virus.” (The common cold is a “virus.”) Well he went into cardiac arrest and we had to wait months for the toxicology reports. The medical examiner finally released that he died of “a virus.”

I hope this is all over the press so people can share stories of people who died in this way.

This was the summer swine flu emerged; My opinion is that he died from that.

5

Allergy to an insect bite or tick or something? Perhaps one that got worse over time with repeated exposure?

6

And this opinion is based on what?

7

About fifteen years ago, my brother got very, very ill with a weird illness (possibly sepsis, although it was never clear). He spent weeks in the ICU in an induced coma while being given multiple antibiotics and other meds. (He survived.)

I learned during that experience that this sort of thing happens a lot more often than you might imagine; every year people get ill and die from unknown causes. And at the time at least, no one tracked such things, although we were told that the CDC was in the process of starting to. I had imagined medicine as a precise science, but sometimes it involves a lot of guesswork. (I also learned that the doctors really love a weird case; they brought every med school class through his room. “You’re never going to see another one like this.”)

8

It sounds like a case of gas gangrene.

Or it could be necrotizing fasciitis. It progresses very rapidly and if not dealt with within a few hours is fatal. It isn’t common, but it isn’t rare, either. I’ve seen it start from an insect sting, from a chichen pox lesion and a splinter. It just depends on contacting the right (wrong) bacteria.

9

What if it was something simple like the veins allowing blood to travel back from his feet failed for some reason (either blocked or totally lost elasticity). So the body kept pumping fluids into the feet, but then they were trapped there. The excess fluids build in the tissues that eventually become infected because waste isn’t being removed, triggering a wide spread swelling reaction.

Until the infection happened, his blood work would all look normal because it is a mechanical failure of the blood vessels?

The only other thing I can think of is that as a farmer he could have been exposed to a huge number of chemicals (depending on what he farmed and how). But I wouldn’t expect an exposure site on the feet, cause those are probably the one part of the body that is usually covered and protected.

Just curious, is there gas well drilling near his farm?

10

My friend’s husband had something like this. He had a small cut or something that became infected, and there was enough swelling in his arm that the skin did split in places. It took a while to find an antibiotic that worked, but they finally did. I think he and his wife were warned that amputation was a possibility if they couldn’t get it under control, but they finally did. It was a long, drawn-out process, however.

11

While what you describe is horrifying it doesn’t strike me as that amazing. Dirt has all sorts of germs in it, and you don’t have to be a farmer to be exposed to dirt although farmers certainly do get up close with a lot of it.

Gas gangrene, necrotizing fasciiitis, weird allergic reactions… any or even a combination of the above. And yes, it can happen that fast. Fortunately these things aren’t as common as colds, but they do happen.

12

Damn. My Google-Fu is failing me but I know I saw a very similar thing on medical detectives or discovery channel recently. A couple were just out walking in the countryside and soon afterwards same symptoms afflicted the husband and the same amputation was necessary. However the amputation cleared the infected “pool” and the guy recovered.

Turns out he was bitten by a tick and contracted bubonic plague.

13

Swine flu is caused by the H1N1 variant of the influenza virus. So, if it was that, he did die of a virus.

14

Children do die of flu. This is why it’s recommended that they get a flu shot every year.

15

Absolutely they do. I wasn’t disputing that. I was clarifying a comment where the OP thought dying of a “virus” and dying of “Swine flu” were somehow incompatible- as if the ME had covered something up or was mistaken.

16

It’s not terribly surprising. Just because the farmer doesn’t have cattle doesn’t mean his farm is sterile.
This story is scary: The Sleeping Wife - resolution here: Sleeping Wife answers

17

Could it have been a case of Compartmentsyndrome*?
*Warning slightly gross picture behind said link.

Simply caused by constantly walking, a little more than usual and then leading to necrosis and possibly rabdo or a Tumor necrosis syndrome sort of issue that lead to renal failure? It’d explain why the antibiotics failed to help.

:shrug: just my wild guess for a Zebra that’s not as crazy as the plague.

18

People have walked across America, just walking around the farm seems very far fetched. That is, unless he had been very sedentary, then suddenly decided to walk all day. Rhabdomyolysis comes with acute muscle injury.
Compartment syndrome is part of what was described. It’s a symptome, not a desease unto itself.

I’m still guessing gas gangrene, since Clostridium perfringens is found in soil, even though it rarely causes a problem, rarely isn’t never.
“When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras”*

*The House of God