When Jennifer Eddy first saw an ulcer on the left foot of her patient, an elderly diabetic man, it was pink and quarter-sized. Fourteen months later, drug-resistant bacteria had made it an unrecognizable black mess.
Doctors tried everything they knew — and failed. After five hospitalizations, four surgeries and regimens of antibiotics, the man had lost two toes. Doctors wanted to remove his entire foot.
“He preferred death to amputation, and everybody agreed he was going to die if he didn’t get an amputation,” said Eddy, a professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.