An Ohio woman is speaking out after waking up from a coma to the horror that both her legs and arms were amputated due to an infection from her dog’s saliva.
Marie Trainer spent 80 days in the hospital and was comatose for 10 days. She opened up told Fox 8 Cleveland about the days leading up to her fallen severely ill.
“When I opened my eyes I didn’t know where I was,” Marie explained to the outlet, per PEOPLE. “Then I found out everything. Being in a coma for 10 days — having this thing. My dog licked me… my dogs lick me all the time.”
“It was very hard to find out that they had to remove my legs and my arms… very hard to cope with,” she said.
Marie recalls feeling nauseous and having back pain, which she thought were symptoms of the flu.
“Her temperature went up then went down to about 93 degrees, that’s when we rushed her to the hospital,” her husband Matthew told Fox 8.
At Aultman Hospital, Marie’s condition worsened and within hours, she developed sepsis.
“We were getting new symptoms and worsening symptoms very rapidly,” Marie’s step-daughter Gina Premier, who works as a nurse practitioner at the hospital, said.
Marie was ultimately placed in a medically induced coma as her limbs were ravaged by gangrene.
When her blood tests came back, she was diagnosed with capnocytophaga, a bacteria that lives in the mouths of dogs and cats — usually spread to people through bites and scratches, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Marie’s doctors believes her two dogs may have licked a scrape on her arm, the report states.
“[It’s] fairly common in the oral flora or the mouth of a dog and it can be transmitted through a bite or sometimes just contact with saliva,” Dr. Margaret Kobe, Medical Director of Infectious Disease at Aultman told Fox 8.
“That organism is very virulent. It has the ability to induce your immune system to do some pretty horrible things,” Kobe added.
“It was so rapid in progression… there was nothing they could do,” Marie’s step-daughter said.
Despite her near-death experience, Marie can’t wait to be reunited with her dogs.
