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Cindy Martinez, the Gwinnett County woman with flesh-eating bacteria, had surgery Thursday, undergoing several amputations, according to a posting on GoFundMe.com.
Her husband, Gwinnett police Officer David Martinez, posted that doctors were amputating his wife’s feet and right hand. The fingers on the left hand weren’t removed, he said.
Doctors don’t know how Martinez, 34, contracted the bacteria. Her illness started as a small pain in her shoulder, her husband said.
“She didn’t have any injury, and initially at home when she was feeling the pain, I looked at where the pain was at and I didn’t notice anything, and that’s what’s troubling,” David Martinez told Channel 2 Action News.
Doctors had already removed dead muscle and tissue before Thursday’s amputations.
The flesh-decaying bacteria, called necrotizing fasciitis, usually enters the body through an open wound.
Ruth Berkelman, a professor of epidemiology at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that some patients remember getting a wound, and some don’t.
If the outer layers of a person’s skin do not seem irritated at the outset of the infection it can easily be missed, Dr. Luttrell Toussaint, a trauma surgeon with Gwinnett Medical Group, wrote in a statement to the AJC.
Toussaint said that if a person’s health is already compromised, the infection can spread rapidly. It was not known whether Cindy Martinez had any pre-existing conditions that may have made her more vulnerable.
Three years ago Aimee Copeland, then a 24-year-old graduate student from Snellville, battled a similar flesh-decaying disease after a ziplining accident. Copeland lost a leg, foot and both her hands to the disease which doctors at one point thought would claim her life.
Copeland survived but went through months of intense rehabilitation to regain her mobility.
The Martinezes, who met as Marines, have been married for 13 years. They have two children: a son, 5, and a daughter, 2.
“It’s just an up-and-down roller coaster right now,” David Martinez previously told the AJC.
