Amy Harris: How a single cat bite turned into a medical nightmare

Decisions made in a split second can be accidental or fatal.

While mine wasn’t fatal, it turned an ordinary day into a hellish week of intense pain, surgeries, days in the hospital and now physio.

It started with what I later learned was a big mistake – I intervened at a nearby cat scrap yard.

Two felines—both normally gentle pets from loving homes—began a fight on my front yard, and in an established “no no” of feline conflict, I reached down to pick one up in an attempt to diffuse the situation.

Then Ted the Burmese put his needle-like fang into my wrist.

The stab wound was small and not particularly painful.

I casually sprayed it with antibacterial wound cleanser, applied a plaster, and proceeded to prepare dinner for my toddler.

Within 20 minutes, however, I noticed a bulge starting to form under the wound and a dull ache started throbbing in my armpit.

I washed the wound again and applied a new bandage. Within an hour I couldn’t move my fingers.

Minutes later, I watched in horror as the swelling gradually crept up my forearm—a large snake-like web that moved before my eyes and seemed to lead to the lymph nodes under my arm.

I called my family and because I couldn’t hold the wheel of the car. My mother took me to the emergency room at Pindara Hospital on the Gold Coast and a doctor inspected the bite within seconds of arriving.

His sense of urgency was unsettling.

“We need to admit you immediately… and you’ll need surgery,” he advised, as an ER nurse hurriedly donned a cannula and administered a hefty dose of fentanyl.

I hadn’t packed anything for a night in the hospital—not even a phone charger—and was handing my house keys to Mom when I was wheeled to a ward in a state of shock at what had happened in just under two hours.

In most cases, it can take up to 24 hours for cat bite infections to develop, but I later learned that bites in the hand, and in my case the front of the wrist, can become annoying much faster due to the many superficial structures such as tendons, joints, blood vessels and nerves.

The wrist is particularly vulnerable because it is only covered with a thin layer of soft tissue.

Knocked out quickly with more pain relief, I awoke in the morning with a flurry of activity in my room as nurses advised that I should be prepped for surgery.

Meanwhile, the pain in my arm was excruciating and the swelling had developed into a violent case of cellulitis—or skin infection—with large bands of raised red blobs.

Less than 24 hours after being bitten, I was driven to a “surgical wash” to determine the depth of the infection, remove any dead tissue, and clean the wound.

My doctor, David Graham, is one of the few orthopedic hand surgeons on the Gold Coast who specializes in hand, wrist and microsurgery.

He gave me the pre-operative overview, told me the seriousness of cat bites and how a unique type of bacteria in their mouths can lead to devastating infections.

When I was driven to the theater he said my injury might need a second wash.

At this point, reality hit. A few hours ago, the most pressing issue was whether to cook macaroni and cheese or chicken nuggets for dinner.

Now I contemplated the reality of one and maybe two surgeries to extract contagious levels of toxic bacteria and a long and no doubt painful recovery. To put it bluntly – things just got really, really fast.

Finally, after the operation, I returned to the ward. Dr. Graham told me that several days of IV antibiotics would be required and I would have to stay in the hospital until he was satisfied there was minimal risk of re-infection.

It was a wild end to a dizzying 24 hours and, as one nurse who has counted three cat bite infections across the ward in the past six months told me, “it’s far from over.”

I face other horror stories from other nurses, doctors, and friends with similar stories of catastrophic cat bites.

Some have resulted in devastating disabilities, loss of limbs or even death.

Some take days to become infected. Some (like mine) only for a few hours.

Armed with too much research time, I discover that cat bites are the second most common bites after dogs, but account for three-quarters of those that lead to infection.

Especially since cat saliva harbors a rare type of bacteria – the deadly Pasteurella multocida – as well as Staphylococcus, E-coli and Salmonella which are all contagious to humans.

Interestingly, 45 to 65 percent of animal bites affect hands and wrists, and women are more likely to be bitten by cats than men, which can be attributed to women’s more affectionate attitudes toward felines.

My case was sadly bolstered by catfight intervention — when adrenal levels in both animals would have been sky-high, likely increasing the depth of the bite and the level of toxic saliva being pumped into my bloodstream.

I eventually scheduled a five-day hospitalization and now face a long bout of oral antibiotics and weeks, possibly months, of physical therapy to regain full use of my hand in what turned out to be a painful (and costly) warning. story.