Not for the faint of heart! Biologist and sci-fi author Peter Watts recounted his near-death brush with flesh-eating bacteria to The Daily:
The doctors say it lives on your skin, waiting for an opening. They say once it gets inside, your fate comes down to a dice roll. It doesn’t always turn your guts to slurry; sometimes you get off with a sore throat. Sometimes it doesn’t do anything at all. They might even admit that it doesn’t always need an open wound. People have been known to sicken and die from a bruise, from a bump against the door.
What they won’t generally tell you is that you can get it by following the doctor’s orders. Which is how I ended up in the ICU, staring through a morphine haze into a face whose concerned expression must have been at least 57 percent fear of litigation. I didn’t get necrotizing fasciitis from a door bump, or from a zip-line. I got it from a dual-punch biopsy — which is to say, from being stabbed with a pair of needles the size of narwhal tusks. There was this lesion on my leg, you see. They needed a closer look. And there was Mr. Streptococcus, waiting on my skin for an invitation in.
