A man’s tooth infection turned into a life-threatening flesh-eating disease.
Terry, from Suffolk, features in Really’s brand-new programme The Face Doctors, which follows patients undergoing life-changing surgery and cutting-edge treatment to rebuild and repair their faces.
What Happened?
In episode two of the show Terry, 65, visits experts at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge with an infected eyeball as doctors race against the clock to save not only his eye, but also his life.
What started as a tooth ache is diagnosed by frightened doctors as aggressive flesh-eating disease necrotising fasciitis – which can cause organ failure and has a high mortality rate.
How He Was Treated
After the pus is removed from his eyelid, Terry is rushed into surgery with Addenbrooke’s specialists, eye surgeon Cornelius Rene and facial surgeon Malcolm Cameron.
Speaking prior to the surgery, Cornelius stressed the urgency of the situation: ‘If you don’t manage these promptly there can be devastating consequences for the patient, it can be life-threatening.
‘If we left this any longer, he could rapidly go into multi-organ failure so his lungs could pack up, his kidneys could pack up and this actually has quite a high mortality rate.’
In the operating theatre, it was all hands-on deck with a whole team of specialists overseeing Terry’s operation.
They started the surgery by removing more excess pus and dead tissue, as Malcolm cites ‘the oldest surgical rule in the book’: ‘if there’s pus, let it out!’
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The team deliberately opted to leave the wound unstitched so that any remaining infection could work its way out of the wound, as they continued to monitor his recovery.
Doctor Shadi said: ‘We think the cause of this was most likely inside your mouth but it’s taken hold around the eye.
‘Tooth infections can be really dangerous because if it spreads into the eye socket he can lose his vision and it would be catastrophic. In addition he could be left with severe disfigurement with consequences for his self-esteem.’
