In a shocking incident, a 29-year-old woman in the United States lost both her hands and feet after she slipped into septic shock following the birth of her second child via C-section. Her quadruple amputations were a result of an infection following her C-section last year.
According to ABC News, Krystina Pacheco from Texas almost lost her life after what she described as an uneventful C-section delivery. She gave birth to her second child on October 24, 2022. Her quadruple amputations were a result of an infection from the C-section in October last year.
According to the woman, she felt feverish on the day she was discharged from the hospital last year, but assumed it was part of the recovery process. The nurse at the hospital reportedly gave her ibuprofen and sent her home.
Pacheco who is also a mother of a two-year-old boy, said she continued to feel unwell and visited a doctor who moved her to a local emergency room. She was soon airlifted to a hospital in San Antonio where doctors confirmed that her body was in septic shock.
“I just remember I couldn’t breathe anymore and I couldn’t see anymore and I just started slowly fading out,” Pacheco told ABC News. “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.”
According to Krystina’s husband Jacob Pacheco, the condition began to affect her heart, lungs and kidneys. He said his wife spent two weeks in the intensive care unit where she was simultaneously put on dialysis to help her kidneys and on an ECMO machine – a lifesaving device that removes carbon dioxide from the blood and sends back blood with oxygen to the body.
In mid-November, Krystina Pacheco began to show enough improvements that doctors were able to take out her breathing tube so she could speak.
The doctors told her a few days later that her feet and hands would need to be amputated. This was because of the damage they had sustained while she was in intensive care.
Aside from having both arms below the elbows amputated, along with both legs below the knees amputated the following days, Krystina Pacheco underwent nearly a dozen skin grafts over the course of the following several weeks due to her damaged skin around her amputations.
