A guy has described his terror after what he thought was a ‘minor’ burn on his thumb resulted in him losing both of his legs.
Max Armstrong spent six days in a coma after a near-fatal incident while camping with his friends in Kiowa, Colorado, in December.
The 40-year-old had gone out into the bush with his pals for a week of exciting outdoor activities when he burnt his thumb while cooking pasta for dinner.
“I grabbed a skillet wrong and my thumb touched the hot part,” Armstrong explained. “I could feel it burning as I moved it to the table, but I didn’t want to drop it.
After finishing his cooking, Armstrong cleansed and bandaged his wound, but a few days later, he noticed that one of his legs had started to swell.
He originally dismissed it since he didn’t think the pain was ‘significant’ at the time, and he suspected he had unintentionally ‘injured his ankle at some point’.
However, by December 7, he was ready to pack his tent and call it a day.
“I decided to head home and my buddy suggested we go to the hospital,” the outdoors lover said. “At that point, my toenails started turning purple and the swelling had increased.”
Armstrong, perplexed as to why his lower limbs were swelling up, went to AdventHealth Parker Hospital.
“At this point, the burn on my thumb had become pretty ugly, it had turned black and looked like it was eating away at my thumb,” the adventurer said.
As he sat down to discuss his strange symptoms with doctors, the business owner described how his eyes began ‘rolling back in his head’ and he started ‘talking nonsense’.
Doctors then realized that strep A bacteria had invaded the burn on his thumb and swiftly progressed to sepsis, which can be life-threatening if not treated appropriately.
Armstrong was subsequently taken to AdventHealth Porter, which had superior facilities for his needs, where doctors put him in an induced coma for six days.
His loved ones were warned to prepare for the worst, but Armstrong suddenly recovered consciousness on December 13th.
But the pleasure rapidly faded when Armstrong realized that his feet were both ‘totally black’, and medics informed him that he would have to have his limbs amputated.
He revealed that while he was in the coma, the infection had totally eaten away at his feet and extended to his legs, making it impossible to save them.
So, on December 23, Armstrong underwent a three-hour procedure to amputate both of his legs, followed by a month of recovery in the hospital.
With this motivation, Armstrong left the hospital on January 14 to attend the Sky Ridge Sports Medicine and Rehabilitation clinic in Colorado, where he spent the next 16 days.
He will now have to rely on a wheelchair for the rest of his life, but he is eager to master triceps and shoulder workouts that will aid his mobility, referring to them as his ‘lifeline’.
