Rachelle Winn never thought after kayaking in Island Park that she would find herself with flesh eating bacteria in her leg.
On July 29, Winn and some friends went on a kayaking trip on Big Springs with their dogs. While a friend packed up their things and Winn looked after the dogs, the dogs ran after a stray dog, knocking down Winn. She fell into the water and got a gash on her knee from a rock.
She went to Madison Memorial Hospital to get stitches. There they prescribed her antibiotics and told her to leave the cut alone, watch for infection and return in two weeks.
A couple days later she noticed part of the wound turned black and by Friday, it was even worse.
“I noticed that my leg smelled like a dead animal,” Winn said. “It smelled terrible.”
The next day Winn went to the emergency room at Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center. They told her she had necrotizing fasciitis, a disease caused by flesh eating bacteria. In this case, the flesh eating bacteria was caused by vibrio, which is found in water.
“When you get injured in water that’s dirty like Big Springs where there’s some warm water and it sits, then your likelihood of getting the bad infections increases,” said Edwin Wells, the medical director for the emergency department at Madison Memorial.
Wells has given presentations on flesh eating bacteria.
As soon as the doctors at EIRMC saw Winn’s infection, they got to work.
“He’s like we’re doing surgery tonight,” Winn said. “I was shocked. I hadn’t planned on any of that. I had no idea I had any of that going on.”
The doctors removed all the dead flesh from her leg, which came up to about 25% of the leg in front of her knee.
“He told me it looked like a shark bite when he looked at it,” Winn said. “It was pretty gross.”
The following week, doctors added bovine tissue to help her tissue grow back. They have to do this multiple times before she gets skin grafts.
Although she had never encountered something like this before, Winn says the medical staff at EIRMC see cases like hers three or four times a month.
Wells says you can still go swimming. Flesh eating bacteria is actually more common out of water, usually from complications with surgery, diabetes, vascular diseases and obesity.
The best thing you can do to minimize the damage from necrosis is keep a close eye on injuries.
“If you get pain, warmth, fever, you gotta come in and get checked because this could be one of those skin and soft tissue infections,” Wells said. “But we can’t know until we check it out fully.”
Despite everything, Winn is grateful for the medical staff’s hard work.
“They treated me like a queen,” Winn said. “They were very good to me, so if you have something like this, a skin disease type thing, EIRMC’s burn unit is one of the top in this area for treatment for that.”
Winn has a GoFundMe to help with medical expenses. Donations can be made here.