Sandy Wilson Survives Flesh Eating Disease

A nurse named Sandy Wilson has endured a five year battle with necrotizing fasciitis, a severe form of flesh eating disease.

She first developed the disease not long after giving birth to her son Christopher in 2005 and has since been through countless surgeries as the bacteria has slowly eaten her alive from the inside out.

“When I looked down at my belly, basically all the skin was gone and I could see my internal organs,” she said. “I remember seeing my intestines. I thought, ‘There’s no way I can live like this … This is a death sentence.’”

Ironically once doctors realized what she had, they shipped her off to the very medical center that she was a nurse at.

“I remember vividly” how sick she was, said Dr. Thomas Scalea, Shock Trauma’s physician-in-chief. “Some people don’t live. Sometimes you do the best you can do and the disease is bigger than the medical care. The fact that she was a nurse at our place, that she had just had a baby, all of that made it very, very hard.”

“I can’t tell you the number of times I operated on her; probably 40, 50 times,” Scalea said. “Every time we went back, we just hadn’t gotten control.”

Since falling ill in 2005, Wilson estimates that her medical bills combined are more than five million dollars, some of which paid by her insurance, the rest by Medicaid.

She is now free of the disease, but has the teltail signs of it, and will for life in the form of many scars on her stomach as well as the slew of drugs she needs to take.

“My life now is pretty normal. I am enjoying spending every moment I can at home with my son,” Wilson said.

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