TRAVEL SICKNESS: Trevor and Carina Sykes. He has almost recovered from the rare, flesh-eating disease that nearly took his life.
TRAVEL SICKNESS: Trevor and Carina Sykes. He has almost recovered from the rare, flesh-eating disease that nearly took his life.
A Mangawhai man had five surgeries to remove dead tissue and muscle from his leg, and weeks in a Dubai hospital fighting the flesh-eating disease necrotising fasciitis.
Five months after his near-fatal illness, Trevor Sykes planned to celebrate the New Year by taking his first swim in their pool since he and his wife Carina returned home from their nightmare.
He joked about getting a huge stocking for Christmas, an especially made surgical one to compress his heavily skin grafted left leg from toes to hip.
Mr Sykes' ordeal that started overseas included eight days in an induced coma, kidney and liver failure, severe weakness during which he could hardly move and, once back in New Zealand, large skin grafts.
From the beginning, specialists in Dubai warned him his left leg might have to be amputated.
Trevor Sykes' leg after being saved from flesh eating disease.
The first effect he felt of the rare disease's rapid onset was a twinge in his thigh as the couple got on the Edinburgh to London train, to begin the journey home from a holiday in Scotland.
By the time they reached London, about four hours later, the pain in Mr Sykes' thigh was severe. By the time they reached Heathrow Airport that evening, he was in a wheelchair, in excruciating pain and taking over-counter painkillers.
There was no redness, swelling or heat on his leg.
On the plane, his health quickly deteriorated and air crew called ahead to the Dubai Airport medical clinic. From there he was rushed to an Emirates public hospital where necrotising fasciitis and severe sepsis were quickly diagnosed.
He went straight into surgery, his kidneys and liver on the brink of failure and his blood pressure dangerously low. The disease requires a perfect storm of conditions for it to take hold.
Mr Sykes had a slight sore throat earlier but no scratch or skin wound.
They are usually portals into the body for the Streptococcus A bacterium which only rarely leads to necrotising fasciitis (NF), sometimes gruesomely called flesh-eating disease or, in past times, ''hospital gangrene''.
Skin grafts were placed over the wounds at Middlemore Hospital.
Experts don't know how Mr Sykes got the disease, but it might have been through his sore throat.
There are about 70 cases of NF in New Zealand each year. In the three months before Mr Sykes was at the Dubai hospital, doctors there had treated seven cases.
His life was saved by antibiotics and five operations in seven days. He doesn't remember being admitted, or the next week, but has a vague memory of post-coma psychosis.
He did feel the agony of daily post-surgery, anaesthetic-free scraping of the wound but said his wife was more aware of the day-to-day trials.
''Never have I been so excited and giggly as when he first wriggled his toes,'' she said.
The Sykes called the wound down his outside left thigh and calf, where kilos of flesh and muscle were removed, ''the crevasse'' — into which vacuum dressings would sink until he had skin grafts at Middlemore Hospital in Auckland.
Once treatment began in Dubai, Ms Sykes' reaction was, ''let's get on with it and do what needs to be done. The practical aspects then started falling into place, too".
She found a hotel near the hospital, but it turned out to be a dive. She found another. She could walk to the ''internationally staffed'' hospital twice daily.
Mr Sykes' leg before the skin graft. Photo/Supplied
''I can't say enough how grateful I am for the consideration and medical professionalism we received. The staff were so understanding and kind, I think because so many of them know what it's like to be away from home.''
Good travel insurance lifted what would otherwise be a terrible load, including paying for a doctor and nurse to accompany the Sykes on the flight back to New Zealand, where he went straight into Middlemore.
''It was incredible the amount of healing that happened when he was there, because we were home,'' Ms Sykes said.
She has finished writing the personal journal, called ''Trevor's Log'', which helped hold her together during his illness.
