A man woke up thinking he had a common cold, only to be rushed to hospital with a flesh-eating bug ravaging his backside.
Simon English, 55, assumed he’d caught a virus from his wife, Kay, 55, who works as a teaching assistant. However, as the hours passed, his symptoms – fever, cough, and fatigue – worsened. By the next day, he knew “something wasn’t right” and took himself to hospital.
Doctors diagnosed Simon with necrotising fasciitis – a bacterial infection that causes parts of the body’s soft tissue to die – leaving him in ICU for three months. Now, after two skin grafts on his left buttock and temporary stoma surgery, he says he’s slowly getting back to normal.
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Simon, a retired fireman from Beverley, Yorkshire, said: “It’s quite scary when you think about this bug, really – I now look like a shark’s taken a bite out of my a**e.” I ended up looking like I was about 70 years old, after lying in bed for weeks. My nurse told me if I’d left it any longer before going to hospital, I wouldn’t be here now. I came so close to dying.”
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(Image: Simon English / SWNS)
On the morning of March 26, Simon woke up with flu-like symptoms. Kay, who works in a school, was “always picking illnesses up” – and had a cold herself, leading Simon to think he was suffering the same symptoms. He says he felt floored by it but put it down to “rarely getting ill” himself. “I just felt like I was coming down with a heavy cold,” he said.
“I’m one of those people where I just never get ill – or rarely,” Simon bragged. His missus was under the weather too, what with germs always lurking around schools. But nothing prepared him for the next morning when he felt absolutely “shocking” as his flu-like symptoms took a nasty turn. Off to A&E he went, and they scooped him up straight after triage.
When he regained his senses, a doc broke it to him that he had necrotising fasciitis, known as the “flesh-eating disease”. This rare beast of an infection takes no prisoners, and it almost took the man’s life, with Simon sharing the chilling words from his doctor that “one in five patients don’t make it”.
(Image: Simon English / SWNS)
Whisked into surgery during his opiate blur as he was now dosed up on morphine, Simon had to have part of his left buttock chopped out not once but four times to cut out the nasty bug. “I had four operations to fully debride it,” he said, still somewhat stunned.
After being patched up and sent back to ICU, Simon’s ordeal dragged on; a skin graft from his right leg to his rebel buttock first failed before the second attempt was a win. Then came the slog of a two-month hospital stay, with Simon sharing, “I had to walk around the hospital with a walking frame.”
Simon spent two more months in the hospital to allow his wound to heal. Due to the severity of the infection, he underwent an emergency colostomy to aid in the healing process.
He is still awaiting news on when the reversal procedure will take place. After being discharged in June, the retiree is gradually returning to his “normal” life.
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