A 29-year-old woman in the United States lost both her hands and feet after going into septic shock days after having her second child via a C-section. In an interview with ABC News, Krystina Pacheco revealed that she became a quadruple amputee as a result of an infection from the C-section in October last year.
Ms Pacheco welcomed her daughter Amelia in what she said was an uneventful C-section delivery. She told the outlet that she had also been discharged from the hospital in Texas, however, after returning home two days later, she began to feel feverish and experience shortness of breath and vomiting.
At first, the mother of two assumed that her symptoms were just part of her recovery post-C-section and was given ibuprofen by a nurse. But when she continued to feel sick, she visited a doctor, who had her dispatched to a local emergency room. From there, she was airlifted to a San Antonio hospital, which diagnosed her with septic shock - an extremely dangerous condition in which the body has an extreme response to infection.
"I just remember I couldn't breathe anymore and I couldn't see anymore and I just started slowly fading out. My husband, I could just hear him saying, 'Please come back to us, please, your babies need you. I need you. I need you to be here and help me with our babies,' and that's the last thing I remember," Ms Pacheco told ABC News.
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The 29-year-old spent two weeks in intensive care breathing through a tube. But she was later told by doctors that the poor blood flow to her hands and feet had caused so much damage that all needed to be amputated.
"My hands and feet were black. They looked like a person who had gotten frostbite," Ms Pacheco told the outlet, adding that her medical team had done everything possible to avoid getting to this point.
According to ABC News, in addition to undergoing an initial surgery to amputate both arms and legs, Ms Pacheco revealed that she also underwent nearly one dozen skin grafts over the next several weeks because the skin around her amputations was so damaged. She spent the next two months in the hospital before finally being discharged to go to a rehab facility.
Ms Pacheco was finally allowed to go home earlier this month, nearly four months since she had given birth. Now, she is caring for both her daughter and her two-year-old son. She is currently doing workouts at home to rebuild her strength and will start outpatient rehabilitation soon so she can get stronger and be self-sufficient in tasks like transferring herself from her bed to a chair and the shower.
