Charleigh Chatterton, the 27-year-old mom from England, says she's lucky doctors caught it but is still on the road to recovery.
A new mom in England is lucky to survive after a rare flesh-eating bacteria nearly took her life just days after delivering her baby.
“My superwoman is defying death and fighting the biggest fight,” dad Liam Boyne said of his fiancée, Charleigh Chatterton, on a Facebook post.
Chatterton, a 27-year-old from Harwich, a coastal town on the east coast of England, delivered her newborn daughter, Alessia, last month smoothly, with no complications, BBC News reported.
She was rushed back to the hospital just days later, when she developed a rash and high fever, according to BBC News.
After countless tests and scans, doctors eventually discovered what they suspected was necrotizing fasciitis, and Chatterton was brought into surgery immediately, BBC News reported.
Necrotizing fasciitis is rare, according to the Centers for Disease Control, with around 1,000 diagnosed cases in the United States annually. Because early symptoms can resemble other illnesses, it is not always easy to diagnose, the CDC reported.
But the infection spreads fast, and can lead to sepsis, shock and organ failure, or life-long complications that can result in amputation or severe scarring, the CDC reported. As a result, the condition can be deadly, and kills around 1 in 5 people in the U.S., according to the CDC.
Thankfully, Chatteron said she “got diagnosed just in time,” according to the BBC.
She was able to return home to her family about three weeks later, and is on the road to recovery, her mom said on social media. “She’s still got a long way to go but thankfully she’s getting there,” her mom, Debbie Jackson, said on Facebook.
“God it’s good to feel some sort of normal,” Boyne said on Facebook Monday.
