A businessman who spent three years in a wheelchair with a mysterious flesh-eating condition was finally cured after a television documentary about spiders revealed the cause of his condition.
By Caroline Gammell 6:25PM GMT 04 Jan 2011
Brian Holman spent three and a half years unable to walk and facing the prospect of amputation after he developed what he thought was a blister on holiday in Turkey.
Doctors struggled to cure the 55-year-old former owner of a marine business and the wound on his ankle only seemed to get worse.
After two operations to remove the infected skin, refusing amputation and taking morphine to ease the pain, Mr Holman happened to watch a programme on the Discovery Channel in which a woman had suffered a similar fate.
It turned out that she had been bitten by a Brown Recluse Spider, a small but poisonous spider found in Turkey.
"A woman on the show who suffered the same gash had turned out to have been bitten by a poisonous spider,” he said.
"The spider was no bigger than an inch.”
Mr Holman, a father-of-four from Fareham in Hants, had gone on holiday with his wife Catherine to Side in southern Turkey.
"We were only a couple of days into the holiday and we had been swimming in the pool," he said.
"I dried off when I got back to the sun-bed and when I pulled the towel away I noticed a little blister. I looked as if I had burnt my leg but it did not hurt at all.
"My wife just said I had better keep it covered up but we did not think any more of it. I did not realise it was a spider bite at the time.
"I did notice two or three around the pool – they were very tiny with spindly legs but I never put two and two together until I saw the programme months later.”
Doctors initially thought he was suffering from a combination of bad sunburn and varicose veins.
After watching the programme Mr Holman consulted his GP who told him to see Pauline Edney, a lead clinical nurse at Fareham College's Community Leg Care Centre.
He said: “I will never forget the look of horror on her face when she saw the wound. She told me straight she didn't think she would be able to heal it."
However, after six weeks of cleaning, dressing and compressing the wound which was several inches wide, it started to heal and has now almost completely recovered.
“I don't think I will ever be the same again because of the damage the spider's venom did to the nerve endings,” he said.
“But at the end of the day, Pauline has given me back my life and saved my leg.”
Miss Edney said: "All we did here is wash it, put cream on, redress it in a new dressing, and kept it compressed in a bandage.
"Once you get into the cycle of treatment doctors then tend to over-treat and forget to go back to basics. Maybe it just needed some fresh eyes.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/8239391/Wheelchair-bound-man-diagnoses-spider-bite-after-watching-documentary.html
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment
You only need to enter your comment once! Comments will appear once they have been moderated. This is so as to stop the would-be comedian who has been spamming the comments here with inane and often offensive remarks. You know who you are!