Fifteen-year-old Connor Pierz didn’t think anything out of the ordinary happened to him on his camping trip.
He had a campfire, he played in the lake, and like all of us do, he got a few mosquito bites.
But when he arrived home, this teen from Northfield, Michigan was suddenly suffering things he never thought he’d have to go through.
All during his camping trip, he’d worn pants, but no shoes. So the mosquito bites that he sustained were almost all on his feet.
His mother, Dawn, said, “He had mosquito bites all over his feet and he had scratched them and then the next day he was on a jet ski on the lake with his friends. So the best theory is that the bacteria entered his body through the mosquito bites that he had been scratching on his feet.”
Connor fell seriously ill. When they took him to the doctor, it was found that he had sepsis. The bacteria from the mosquito bites had gotten into his blood.
Sepsis is a condition in which the body fights infections that aren’t there, and goes into overdrive and starts attacking itself.
As a result, Connor’s organs began to fail in its attempts to fight the infection. He fell into a coma, and was put on a ventilator in the hospital.
Doctors were unsure of when Connor would wake up. But after ten days, he woke up and began to heal.
Sepsis is fatal in about half of the cases. Connor knows how lucky he is. He went back to the hospital two months after his infection to thank everyone involved for saving his life. “If it wasn’t for them, who knows where I’d be today,” he told WJBK News.
But one thing was enjoyable about his recovery—he was required to play video games to bring down the swelling in his hands.
“My hands were like balloons, and then, just a day of play Xbox, you could tell they were going back to normal. Three days of Xbox, my hands were normal again.”
