My swollen knee wasn’t a sprain, it was flesh-eating bacteria

Jennifer Barlow thought she was suffering from a bad knee sprain — then, she went septic.

She had just returned to Atlanta from her vacation in the Bahamas in January when she started to feel weak and experience swelling in her right knee.

“It was so swollen — it was at least three times the size of my left knee. It was really scary,” Barlow, a US Army vet, told Today. “I was in excruciating pain.”

At the emergency room, physicians chalked it up to a simple strain, putting Barlow on crutches and giving her some medicine for pain.

She described her limb as “like a giant’s leg,” so swollen and hot to the touch.

But one day, the 33-year-old, once “healthy as an ox,” suddenly passed out on the floor, where her brother discovered her.

Barlow didn’t have a knee sprain — she had sepsis.

Barlow had gone into septic shock and was showing signs of kidney and liver failure, according to her doctors, needing a machine to help her breathe and medication to keep her stable.

“I was very concerned that she would not survive this,” said her physician, Dr. Jonathan Pollock from the Joseph Maxwell Cleland Atlanta Veterans Affairs Medical Center. “It is fair to say that her life was in grave danger.”

Barlow had contracted a rare, potentially lethal bacterial infection that results in necrotizing fasciitis, or a “flesh-eating disease,” which is believed to be caused primarily by group-A strep.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, early intervention with antibiotics is key to treating the bacteria, which spreads rapidly and causes areas of the skin to become red, swollen and hot to the touch.

However, diagnosis can prove challenging in the disease’s early stages, and severe infection can lead to sepsis, shock and organ failure.

Over the last five years, the CDC reports that one in five patients with necrotizing fasciitis has died.

Barlow was put in a medically induced coma for 10 days, undergoing 12 surgeries during that time to remove dead tissue in her thigh and waking up “confused and scared.”

“I never in my life had heard of sepsis,” Barlow said. “And I had never heard of flesh-eating bacteria.”

Doctors couldn’t say for certain how or when Barlow contracted the bacteria, but managed the infection with antibiotics and removing dead tissue from her leg.

When Barlow was stable enough to be transported, she went to Grady Memorial Hospital for expert wound care, but ultimately underwent amputation in March despite doctors’ best attempts to save her leg.

“We were all the way down to muscle on the thigh on her leg,” said surgeon Dr. Tamra McKenzie-Johnson, who was also involved in her care. Barlow estimates that she underwent over 30 surgeries.

After returning home in May, Barlow is now relearning how to live her everyday life with the loss of her leg.

A GoFundMe to cover medical and rehabilitation costs has raised $38,645 as of Tuesday, more than half of her goal.

“This will help her to get back on her feet…..(or foot ), both physically and emotionally, to rebuild her life after such a devastating loss,” the fund-raising page reads.

While she’s currently using a wheelchair and walker to get around, she hopes to meet with experts at the Maryland-based Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for a prosthetic limb.

“There are so many innovations and technology for prosthetics,” she said. “I’m extremely open to linking up with somebody who could help me.”