Mark Day, 62, a builder from Colchester, Essex, has lost both legs and most of his fingers to a sepsis – rare complication of an infection – after receiving a bitten by cane family’s, a Akita two-year-old American. The infection, in fact, would have been caused by the bacteria present in the dog’s mouth. Mark was bitten on August 19th, exactly the day of his brother-in-law’s funeral, Barry Harris, 46, also died of a serious infection caused by the bite of the same dog. But it wasn’t until Mark’s hospitalization that the family discovered the correlation between the animal’s bite and Barry’s death.
Barry died of cardiac arrest after Ted, the Akita’s name, bit him in the arm. The wound became severely infected, causing heart failure three days later. After Mr. Harris died in July, Pauline and Mark Day, Barry’s sister and brother-in-law, welcomed the dog and looked after him. Then, on August 19, Mark was also bitten. Ms. Day said: «It’s like a nightmare. You just don’t think it happened. First the shock of my brother, now my husband. It is simply surreal“. The infection caused Mark to run a fever, and he said his legs felt like “two blocks of ice”. Then the man ended up in a coma and for 10 days he struggled between life and death. In the end, yes he is awake, but his body was now unrecognizable.
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