CASE 2
New mother critical after being infected with flesh-eating bacteria hours after giving birth to twins
- Lana Kuykendall's infection grew one quarter of an inch in an hour
- She was home from the maternity ward for just 13 hours before she returned to the hospital
- Unable to care for her children as she fights for her life in intensive care unit
By Daily Mail, 18 May 2012
A new mother is fighting for her life after she was infected with a flesh-eating bacteria that sent her back to the hospital just 13 hours after she was released following the birth of her twins.
The infection began as a small bruise on Lana Kuykendall's leg, though it began growing rapidly -- about one quarter of an inch an hour.
The mother from Upstate, South Carolina, is now in critical condition at a hospital in Greenville.
Torn away: Lana Kuykendall can't take care of her newborn twins because she is fighting for her life with a tube in her throat
Mrs Kuykendall, 36, is the second woman in the South to contract a rare bacterial infection called necrotizing fasciitis, which can spread rapidly as it kills flesh.
Aimee Copeland, 24, a graduate student at the University of Georgia, has last one leg and the fingers on one of her hand after she was infected when she cut herself after falling from a homemade zip line.
Her family fears she could lose an arm and the foot on her other leg, as well.
Mrs Kuykendall is a trained paramedic, who knew something bad had happened when she spotted the spot on her leg and began experiencing pain that wouldn't go away.
She had been home from Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, where she gave birth to Ian and Abigail, for just 16 hours.
Early detection: Mrs Kuykendall quickly recognized something was wrong because she is a paramedic. Her husband, Darren, is a firefighter
Critical condition: Within 90 minutes of arriving at the hospital, doctors rushed Mrs Kuykendall into surgery to removed the infected tissue
Her husband took her to the hospital and within 90 minutes, she was in emergency surgery. Doctors removed the dead, infected flesh on her leg in the hopes that they could stop the bacteria from spreading.
Before she went into surgery, Mrs Kuykendall and her husband Darren watched in horror as the infection visibly spread throughout her leg.
'And the longer she sat there, the bigger that spot got. It was initially the size of a 3-by-5 index card. But it got bigger and bigger,' Mr Kuykendall, a firefighter, told the newspaper.
'It moved a quarter of an inch in half an hour. Then the high-risk OB physician had a suspicion of what it was.'
Mrs Kuykendall is currently in the intensive care unit of Greenville Memorial Hospital, breathing through a tube. And she's missing out on some of the most important early days of her newborns' lives.
'(We're) still in disbelief that here is my friend, who just had these two beautiful babies, and now she is intubated upstairs, and not able to enjoy the bonding experience, and enjoy the babies,' her friend Kayla Moon told MSNBC