Beware The Ordinary

"I had some personal hard days. But the main worry was how I was going to deal with my family. There was one day and one of the doctors said he heard circulation in my hand and that they were going to possibly be able to save my hand."
Christine Caron, Ottawa

Imagine the impossible. Bereft of all your limbs how would you, how could you possibly manage pedestrian things of everyday life. As a quadriplegic you would be entirely dependent on others to perform the most simple tasks that able-bodied people -- which is most people -- never give a second thought to. How would you get out of bed in the morning? Wash yourself. Prepare a meal. Earn a living. Travel anywhere. Much less look after your four children. And the home you share with them as a single mother.

Surely, at age 46, this kind of thinking would rate as bizarrely twisted. Why would anyone give something so completely unbelievable a second thought? Unless they were threatened with the loss of their legs, their arms, their clever hands. Left with a torso and all the intelligence remaining quite intact in their practical heads. You are informed, through no one's fault, that you must prepare to lose mobility, capability, independence.

Your legs and your arms must be amputated. To save your life. You might think: what life? What is there left of life if you cannot do anything but think, see, hear, and feel. And you would feel utterly dreadfully hopeless. Christine Caron was playing a tug of war game with two of her four dogs on the 18th of May. Her three-year-old Shih Tzu, manoeuvring for a better grip grazed her knuckle.

"It didn't seem like a big deal" she said in an interview. How many of us having sustained a slight injury have experienced the instant interest of our pet dogs in the site. They immediately offer to make it better, to lick the wound clean. But clean is a relative concept; the saliva on the soothing tongue that licks the blood off the wound comes complete with a bacteria common to dogs called Capnocytophaga canimorsus.

It rarely causes infection in humans. The Public Health Agency of Canada declares this type of infection to have been reported roughly 200 times worldwide since 1976. In Christine Caron's case, a few days after her knuckle was scratched by her little dog, and licked 'clean' by her three other dogs, "I went to bed on May 21 and I don't remember anything after that". For a month and a half she knew nothing, since she was in a coma.

Soon after awakening from the coma doctors informed her of the need to amputate her limbs. All four would have to be taken. But then one of the surgeons informed her they could save one of her arms, and her hand, her right hand. She is re-learning how to use that hand at the Ottawa Hospital Rehabilitation Centre. "It was like a -- I don't know -- it was like the moment that I decided that this was going to be it and we were going to do it and there's no question, it has to happen."

She lost her employment with the National Research Council two years earlier, and has no private insurance to pay for the prosthetic limbs she will require, let alone the refitting of her home to accommodate her new realities. A fundraising drive has been launched on her behalf with the goal of raising $100,000.

fundrazr.com "Caring for Chris"