British mother-of-five Donna Corden, 51, lost half her face and almost died after being infected by flesh-eating bacteria. She contracted a disease called necrotizing fasciitis.
After suffering a fall and hitting her head on an oven in 2017, Donna had a small cut on her eyebrow. The condition looked more like a routine injury.
“It was tiny, probably a half-inch cut,” he told the Daily Star news portal.
However, the next day, the wound got worse much faster than expected. “My face really started to swell up. My eye started to turn black, but nowhere near where the cut was. Around the eye socket and under the eye, black blisters started to appear,” Donna said.
As the British woman showed no signs of improvement, one of her daughters, Jaydem, 31, took the initiative and rushed her mother to the hospital. There, she discovered that, in addition to the black skin, Donna had kidney failure and sepsis—widespread infection.
The somewhat frightening diagnosis came soon after: she had a rare and lethal infection, necrotizing fasciitis. According to case reports in the Revista Médica de Minas Gerais, the disease, caused by flesh-eating bacteria, is characterized by triggering extensive and rapidly progressive necrosis.
It commonly occurs in the subcutaneous cellular tissue and muscle fascia. In Donna’s case, the bacteria was eating away at her face and on its way to her brain.
According to the British woman, her flesh was being dissolved at a rate of 3 centimeters per hour. The only way to block the action of these microorganisms was through surgery.
“I had life-saving surgery where they literally had to remove half of my face. They were working around the clock there,” he recalled.
After the procedure, she fell into a coma for four days and subsequently had to remain on a life support machine for several weeks.
She also underwent another surgery, to implant a piece of thigh skin in the “hole” that had been left in her face.
Since then, Donna has had “15 or 16 surgeries” of repair, and now she’s waiting to have another procedure done — she’s going to lift one side of her mouth. The British still plans to tattoo the graft with a color closer to the rest of the body.
While waiting to undergo other treatments, she also talks about a gift she got in the midst of this whole situation: love. Donna bonded with an old friend (James Olsen) from preschool during her internship, and they are still together to this day.
“We’re getting married. I thought I’d never meet anyone after this happened to me,” he said.
The two exchanged messages on Facebook after James expressed concern about his health. “We went out for a drive in the car, and that’s it, we’ve been together ever since,” he celebrated.
The wedding is due to take place in June 2024 in Cyprus, a Mediterranean island on the Asian continent.
It is worth mentioning that, according to the NHS (United Kingdom’s national health service), the symptoms of necrotizing fasciitis are severe pain or loss of sensation near a cut or wound, swelling of the skin around the area and flu-like symptoms, such as high fever, headache and tiredness.
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