Until June 13th, Chris was just a regular guy. He wasn’t sick, didn’t have any illnesses.
One night he started vomiting and having muscle pains in his legs. He tried to wait it out to see if it got better; it didn’t.
Finally, his wife convinced him that he needed to see a doctor. What they didn’t know is that he had caught a very serious and very deadly bacterial infection. By the time Chris went to the emergency room, he was already in severe septic shock. One by one, his organs shut down. Kidneys, liver, pancreas, even his blood stopped working properly.
To keep him alive, doctors put in a breathing tube and gave him multiple medications to keep his blood pressure up. They connected him to a machine that functioned for his kidneys and gave him multiple blood products.
Despite everything that was going wrong in his body, Chris fought to survive. Very slowly he started improving. His blood pressure started going up, they took him off the medications, and were able to get the breathing tube out.
However, the damage was more extensive than anyone could have expected. Having such a severe infection caused the muscles in his arms and legs to die. In order to keep him alive, a drastic measure needed to be taken. He needed to have the dead tissue removed, and he needed it done quickly. Chris was taken to the operating room on July 6th for amputations of both of his arms and both of his legs.
He survived the surgery but in the process of recovery gained multiple secondary infections, including a fungal infection in his blood, pneumonia, and a urinary tract infection.
Despite everything, Chris is still fighting. He’s alive, and he’s working hard to get himself home. He works with the physical therapists every day to gain back the strength that he’s lost, and to learn to live without his forearms and legs.
He has a huge task in front of him, but he won’t be doing it alone. That’s why we’re asking for your support. His wife, Tina, is modifying their house to accommodate his return. She needs to build a wheelchair ramp into their house, refit their car to be handicap accessible, not to mention all of the millions of tiny things that require attention.
Until recently, my brother was just a regular guy. He had the unfortunate luck of getting sick with a very bad bacteria that changed his life forever. That bacteria nearly took his life, but he survived. Now, he wants to live out a regular life, but needs your help.