WARNING: Graphic content
He suffered a flesh-eating disease, a heart attack and a stroke — all inside a few days.
But Queensland dad-of-four Shawn Dell is counting himself lucky.
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“A family meeting was called at the Royal Brisbane (Hospital) and my family was told there was basically a 95 to 100 per cent chance I wasn’t going to wake up,” Dell told 7NEWS.com.au.
“Let’s just say I’m a very lucky man to be talking to you today.”
The 37-year-old North Lakes man’s grave health ordeal began when he woke up one night in June and could not stop “profusely” vomiting.
Believing he may have been suffering food poisoning from a barbecue that night, he managed to fall back asleep for a few hours.
But when he woke up in the morning, his legs were yellow — a symptom of jaundice caused by liver and other organ failure.
The last thing Dell, a military veteran, remembers is being “quite worried” as he was loaded onto an ambulance outside his house.
Over the next nine days, as he lay unconscious in intensive care, he underwent four surgeries to cut out skin tissue from his chest area that had been infected by necrotising facisiitis.
It’s believed he suffered the heart attack during his vomiting spell “due to the infection moving toward my heart and putting a clot in my heart”, Dell said.
He said the stroke was caused by the “balloon pump inside me to keep my heart pulsating”.
When Dell woke up, he was shown the massive open wound on his neck and chest, a moment he describes as “pretty surreal”.
He remained in hospital for another nine days before being discharged.
Five weeks after the ordeal, the wound is covered by a biofilm ahead of a skin graft.
Otherwise, Dell says physically, he’s doing all right. But the mental side of his recovery is a challenge.
“I’ve still got some stuff to work through,” he said.
“My kids pretty much had to say their last goodbyes. I had the easy bit, I was asleep.
“Mentally, that’s taking a bit of a toll on me. But that’s something I’m working on.”
So how did Dell get necrotising facisiitis? He has no idea, but he and his wife believe it may have entered his body through an ingrown hair or pimple on his neck “that I’d sort of scratched”.
“I did have a small mark on my neck which did look infected,” he said.
Dell says if the infection had spread toward his throat or brain or spine, he would have died.
“Luckily, the doctors managed to carve out half my chest, which is not ideal, but it saved my life,” he said.
He believes his ability to recover has been aided by his fitness and the “never-say-die attitude” from his military background.
“I’ve got too much to live for,” he said.
With Dell unable to work for the foreseeable future, a GoFundMe campaign has been set up to support his young family.
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