Ben Whiteside planned to have a fun trip to Asia, backpacking with his girlfriend, Anneka. They were hiking in Asia, in Tiger Leaping Gorge in China’s Yunnan Province when disaster struck.
Ben scraped his knee on something on their hike. Little could he have known, he became infected with necrotizing fasciitis. It’s a flesh-eating bacteria, and it started to cause problems pretty quickly.
On the 14 hour bus ride back to Laos from their hike, Ben started to complain of pain in his knee.
When they got to a town with a hospital, a doctor told him the scrape was infected, and gave him antibiotics.
But the next day, he was worse. He was vomiting and feverish.
“I don’t know what his temperature was,” said Anneka. “But he was boiling and very sweaty…we thought he was reacting to the antibiotics.
They went back to the doctor, who told them that his knee infection was controlled and that the vomiting must be from food poisoning.
The next day, he felt a little better.
Anneka, feeling like he was safer, went out exploring. When she came back, Ben was even worse than before. He had swelling in the top of his thigh, and he was sick again.
At a local hospital in Laos, Thailand, they gave Ben an X-ray and some vitamins to replenish the ones lost after vomiting.
“We knew it was an infection and they just weren’t dealing with it,” said Anneka. “Nobody seemed to know what they were doing. It was terrifying.”
They were sent back out and went back to sleep. But Ben woke up to the feeling of something on the back of his leg.
Anneka shone her phone flashlight on it, and it revealed that the skin was purple and black, and a big open wound had developed.
WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGE
After some panicked calls to relatives and to Bangkok Hospital, Ben was flown to Bangkok, where he was taken to surgery.
The infection, it turned out, was not just in his thigh. It had spread to his kidneys, and had caused him to develop sepsis, or blood poisoning.
Ben responded well to treatment, and was well enough to be flown to a local hospital after fourteen days. However, the bacteria ate down to the bone in his leg.
Now, he’s gone through seven healing procedures, and his kidneys were flushed of the infection.
The couple is back in the UK and Ben will probably make a full recovery, but the couple says they aren’t going to stop travelling.
“What happened to Ben can actually happen to anyone who isn’t immune to this specific bacteria no matter where they are,” said Anneka. “We’ll definitely go travelling again—just maybe not in Laos.”
