A WOMAN woke up to a living nightmare when she found her fingers and toes had turned black after a severe case of the flu turned out to be meningitis and sepsis.
Juttima Chinnasri wasn’t alarmed when she started to experience symptoms such as nausea, weakness and a high fever while at work and carried on with her day-to-day tasks
But the next morning, the 30-year-old from Australia woke up with purple spots on her face and was rushed to hospital.
Juttima was put on life support for a week in October 2018 and when she woke up her fingers and toes had turned black due to blood poisoning caused by the meningococcal disease.
She had to have surgery to have her fingers and feet amputated after doctors said they were unable to save her limbs.
In January 2019, she returned home from hospital and struggled with her mental health as she had to learn to walk using her prosthetic legs.
She has now shared graphic photos of her before and after her surgery in a bid to inspire other amputees.
“The photos I have shared are quite graphic but it shows the reality of meningitis and blood poisoning,” she explained.
“When I woke up and saw my black fingers and feet – I was shocked. It was terrifying and I refused to accept that I had to have them amputated for days but eventually I realised that they couldn’t be saved.
“Life has changed drastically since this happened – I had to learn to do everything again from walking to picking things up to simple things like going to the bathroom by myself.”
She added that she was unable to do what she did before.
“You’re in the same environment but you can’t just walk anywhere. I started getting depressed, I caught it early and started working on my mental health and it got better,” she said.
“I want to inspire other people. I wanted to hide my legs and wear long trousers at the start but it’s not practical – I decided to learn to not care what people thought.
“I find it difficult to accept that my life has changed but I decided I’m going to live with this, I can’t do anything about it so I have to accept it.”
Juttima said that any day she’s feeling down she remembers the day she was in hospital and was unable to lift her head or sit up unaided.
“That put things into perspective – I can do almost anything and I can live quite a normal life once I learned to adapt”.
When Juttima first started to feel unwell she took herself to the onsite medical centre at her workplace as she said she wanted to keep working.
She said she just took some paracetamol and the health practitioner told her her temperature was 39C.
What is sepsis?
The condition is always triggered by an infection.
Most often the culprit is an infection we all recognise – pneumonia, urinary infections (UTIs), skin infections, including cellulitis, and infections in the stomach, for example appendicitis.
Typically, when a person suffers a minor cut, the area surrounding the wound will become red, swollen and warm to touch.
This is evidence the body’s immune system has kicked into action, releasing white blood cells to the site of the injury to kill off the bacteria causing the infection.
What are the signs?
If you, a loved one, or in the case of medical professionals their patient, feels “severely sick”, doesn’t appear to be themselves and shows any of the following symptoms, sepsis should be suspected:
- weakness
- loss of appetite
- fever and chills
- thirst
- difficult or rapid breathing
- rapid heart rate
- low blood pressure
- low urine output
“I was too tired to go to the doctors so I just went home and got into bed.
“My dad walked in to check on me and he touched my arm and I had to pull back really quickly because the skin was so sensitive”.
The next morning she was unable to get out of bed.
“I woke up vomiting and with diarrhoea. After I threw up, I looked in the mirror and there were bright purple spots all over my face and I was very pale.
“At that point, I couldn’t walk and was crawling between the bedroom and bathroom”.
She was taken to hospital where she remained unconscious for a week.
“My family told me that my fingers and feet were starting to go black during that time and when I woke up, they were fully black”.
Juttima’s fingers and feet turned black as the bacteria from her illness went into her blood stream which caused blood poisoning.
She said: “When I woke up, I was hoping they would be able to fix it but I knew that there was no going back.
“I was eventually released from hospital in January 2019 and was wheelchair bound for two months whilst I waited for my prosthetic legs to arrive”.
Juttima began struggling with her mental health after her prosthetic legs arrived as she had to completely learn how to walk and use her hands again.
Most read in Fabulous
She adds: “I had to relearn how to write and I still struggle with picking up little things like coins and cotton tips, even doing up the buttons on my shirt.
“It took longer to learn how to use my prosthetic legs – I’ve only just started to walk with no crutches so it’s taken me over a year.
“This has changed my life but I hope to inspire other people and when I’m having a bad day, I always look back to when I was in hospital and my family were told that I might not make it and that motivates me to keep on going because I’m still here”.
Juttima is hoping to inspire others through her TikTok and Instagram accounts.