Two years after being struck down by a rare flesh-eating bacteria, British entrepreneur Mark Brooks is rebuilding his life after a brush with death that led to more than 25 operations and a medical bill topping $450,000.
A cocktail of circumstances led to his ill fortune in December 2023, when he rapidly developed necrotising fasciitis, shortly after leaving the UK on a flight home to Dubai.
Mr Brooks, president of the Internet Dating Excellence Association, unwittingly created the perfect storm in which life-threatening bacteria could thrive.
During a trip to the UK, he attended a gym and took part in a strenuous workout while fasting inside an ice-cold weights room in the middle of winter, despite fighting off a throat infection.
Putting his body under extreme pressure sent him into physical meltdown that ultimately led to organ failure as doctors battled to save his arm.
Now dealing with the long-term psychological impact of his near-death experience, he plans to write a book about his ordeal and hopes others living a similar fast-paced life can learn from his mistakes.
“The morning after landing in Dubai I got this crazy fever and slept for 13 hours solid. When I woke up in the morning my arm was completely dead,” said Mr Brooks, 54, who is married with three daughters and lives in Dubai Marina.
“With the last of my energy, I pulled together this little go-bag, scraped myself downstairs and took a taxi to the hospital. People with necrotising fasciitis often get packed off home with a painkiller, that’s precisely why the mortality rate is 20 per cent.
“If the diagnosis is delayed, people die, they don't take it seriously. If I'd gone to bed that night, I would have died in bed probably, or woken up and been irreparably damaged. I would have probably lost my kidneys and I certainly would have lost my arm.”
Rotting limb
An hour into his visit to Al Zahra Hospital in Dubai, a bruise began to appear on his arm – the first sign of the flesh-eating bacteria devouring him from the inside out. It was their beginning of a five-week hospital stay, with several days of intensive care on a high-dependency ward.
The skin on his arm was removed along with his brachialis muscle, as the necrosis had spread. That led to sepsis and organ failure, which he was lucky to survive. As specialists at Al Zahra Hospital fought to save his arm, seven rounds of dialysis and four blood transfusions brought him back into a stable condition.
Treatment then focused to rebuilding his arm, removing fat from his abdomen to restore the damaged tissue and grafting skin on to his limb.
Doctor predict he will regain almost full mobility in his arm. Mr Brooks has started work on his book, called Eaten Alive, that he hopes to be published in the next year or so.
“I used to be crazy scared of dying and now I'm not,” he said. “I didn't have any notion of my mortality when I was in the ICU, but I was pretty close.
"For the first year, I would describe it as the 'pain train'. I'd be sitting there, everything fine, and then I'd feel it coming, and I’d be absolutely distraught and feel like crying uncontrollably as the wave came over me. Then it was gone, that was the form of PTSD. I call it the 'sea of despair'.
“Anybody could get this, but I'm fully responsible because I created the conditions necessary for this to blossom. God knows what would have happened to me if I didn't have decent health insurance. I’m very lucky. I've still got my arm, I've still got my life.”
Health insurance has covered most of his medical bills, aside from about $40,000. His treatment was led by Dr Mohan Rangaswamy, a consultant plastic surgeon at Al Zahra Hospital, Dubai.
“This is a rare condition, but to have such an extensive one, which is almost life-threatening, is even more unusual,” said Dr Rangaswamy.
“We cannot be sure what actually tipped the balance, but it was a combination of factors. As in most cases of necrotising fasciitis, we cannot pinpoint a definite initiating event. It is literally a bolt from the blue.”
Antimicrobial resistance
Drug-resistant bacteria have become one of most-threatening barriers to delivering effective health care. When common bacteria, such as streptococcus responsible for sore throats, mutate to become superbugs, minor conditions can turn life threatening.
Bacteria producing toxic, poisonous substances become resistant to some antibiotics. These necrotising toxins lead to gradual tissue death.
Since 2017, only 16 new antibiotics have won regulatory approval, with the development of novel bacteria-killing drugs a slow and unprofitable process.
“On a broad perspective, excessive and abuse of antimicrobials in the society among humans and animals has exposed bacteria to powerful antibiotics, and they start producing antidotes to the antibiotics,” said Dr Rangaswamy.
“That could be the reason that necrotising fasciitis does happen. In the last three years we have treated just three cases.
“If there is a lot of pain and you don't have a plausible explanation for it, if the pulse rate is high, the person is not looking so good, not feeling so good, you should get them checked out.”
