A woman has opened up about her near-deadly battle with malaria, which left her requiring the amputation of both her feet.
For about a year and a half, 52-year-old Stephenie Rodriguez from Sydney, Australia, battled the disease after contracting cerebral malaria from a mosquito bite in Lagos, Nigeria.
Rodriguez, a single mother, had been speaking at a business event with travel executives. She took part in a photo shoot next to a pool of stagnant water, which is where the digital entrepreneur says she was bitten three times by a mosquito on her left ankle, per The Sydney Morning Herald.
She had decided against taking any anti-malarial drugs after previously suffering a bad reaction from it and instead used insect repellant.
Rodriguez flew to India days later, where she started feeling acute exhaustion, something which she said was "out of character" for her. At the time, she simply put it down to "compound jet-lag".
Leaving India, she arrived in Boston - her first time in the United States. However, her trip came to an abrupt end when she was hospitalized after she experienced difficulties eating and drinking.
Some 20 hours later, an infectious diseases specialist confirmed the 52-year-old had cerebral Malaria - by then the Sydney socialite had fallen into a coma.
Doctors gave her a drug, which is used to treat severe cases of malaria, but it sent her into septic shock and organ failure. After this, Rodriguez was given a two percent chance of survival.
In a desperate bid to save her life, vasopressor drugs were used on the patient to redirect blood flow from her limbs to her vital organs.
"It was the last trick in the bag, and they cautioned my family that if I survived, there would be collateral damage," she said. "The vasopressors robbed my feet and hands, the things furthest from my heart, of blood and like frostbite, the areas without blood and oxygen began to die."
The drugs had the effect of blackening her hands and feet from necrosis. Rodriguez even recalled seeing her own toe fall off into her hand.
"It was horrible, absolutely horrible. Completely unimaginable," she said.
After she was airlifted back to Australia, doctors decided Rodriguez would need to undergo an above the knee amputation along with some of her fingers.
Terrified by the prospect of such a drastic procedure, she decided to undergo a number of skin grafts and operations instead to see if her condition got any better.
She later accepted that the amputations were necessary. She even had to get her remaining toes removed.
Rodriguez underwent an operation to have both feet amputated and replaced with above-ankle bilateral osseointegrated implants and mechanical feet.
"It's bizarre, but I had to cut my feet off to walk again," she said.
