Dogs especially puppies are so cute that you just kiss them without precautions. No matter how neat and cute they tend to be, they also carry deadly bacteria which is found in saliva.
However, no matter how irresistibly cute they look, do not allow them to lick on open cuts.
After returning home from a Punta Cana vacation, Marie Trainer called out of work with a backache and nausea. Then her temperature spiked and dropped, sending her to a local Stark County, Ohio, emergency room in the early hours of May 11.
When Trainer woke in a hospital bed nine days later, her hands and legs had been amputated.
It took doctors seven days to discover Trainer incurred a severe infection, not from a “tropical” travel disease as they first suspected, but from her German shepherd’s kisses.
Trainer contracted a rare infection from the bacteria capnocytophaga canimorsus, probably when her German shepherd puppy, Taylor, licked an open cut.
Dr. Margaret Kobe, the medical director of infectious disease at Aultman Hospital in Canton, Ohio, treated Trainer and described her as “delirious” when she entered the intensive care unit. Shortly after, she became unconscious. Her skin started changing rapidly to a purplish-red color, and then it progressed into gangrene. Trainer then developed a blood clot.
“It was difficult to identify, We’re kind of the detectives. We went through all these diagnoses until we could narrow things down,” Kobe said.
The infection spread to the tip of her nose, ears, legs and face. “She didn’t lose parts of her face. But her extremities is what she had to have surgery on,” Kobe said.
The family sought a second opinion, hoping to save Trainer’s limbs. But doctors said the damage had already been done. Blood tests and cultures confirmed the diagnosis of capnocytophaga.
“That was a pretty hard pill for us to all swallow, to say she was fine a couple days ago on vacation and now she’s actively getting worse by the minute and now her hands and feet aren’t alive, like this doesn’t happen, it’s 2019,” said Gina Premier, Trainer’s step-daughter and a nurse at Aultman Hospital.
Trainer has had eight surgeries so far and is working with doctors to be fitted for prostheses.
“This is off the scale, one of the worst cases we have seen in terms of how ill people become with infections,” Kobe said. “She was close to death.”
