A GRANDMA had to have two nose operations after a superbug caused a flesh-eating infection to eat away at her face.
Maria Sholder, 48, has MRSA – a type of bacteria that’s resistant to several widely used antibiotics and can go on to cause several other infections.
MRSA can live harmlessly on the skin of around 1 in 30 people, usually in the nose, armpits, or groin – and it’s believed Maria was a carrier of the bacteria.
After falling and hitting her nose on a door handle in January 2019, she went to hospital where medical staff applied Steri-strips but her nose still became infected.
The mum-of-three, who worked for the NHS, soon developed a flesh-eating infection that caused her nose to completely collapse.
She explained: “I started hearing a whistling through my nose and I thought: ‘What is that?’
“When I looked I saw a little hole but by the time I got seen by a doctor it was the size of half a pence and then it just kept getting bigger.
“Eventually it pierced through my septum. The hole just got bigger and bigger. The pain was absolutely horrific when it was rotting away, I was crying in pain.
“It basically just ate away at the flesh.”
Maria has since had two nose operations but it has recently collapsed again although not as severely as previous times.
Since then she has been in and out of hospital with countless infections – but it was only in October last year she found it was MRSA.
Maria was told the MRSA lay dormant on her skin for some time but once there is an open wound, the bacteria gets into the body and doctors no longer know where the MRSA is.
The grandmother-of-five explained: “I felt like no one was listening to me I was constantly in hospital. I just wanted to know what was wrong. I’ve been told it was lots of different things, even the menopause.
The pain was absolutely horrific when it was rotting away, I was crying in pain.
Maria Sholder
“I suffer from constant fatigue, just to walk to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee is so tiring.
“I watch movies and boxsets just to keep myself sane. When I get bad, I can’t get out of bed.
“I don’t think a lot of people think about the long-term affects.”
Maria’s life is now completely bound by her poor health and has adapted her diet to lower the risk of infection.
MRSA can be transferred if you touch someone who has it, share things like towels, sheets, and clothes with someone who has MRSA on their skin, or touch surfaces or objects that have MRSA on them.
It can be removed from the skin with an antibacterial cream or an antibacterial shampoo but if you get an infection, you’ll usually be treated with antibiotics that work against MRSA.
This means Maria constantly disinfects her house and uses antibacterial body wash and hand sanitiser religiously to protect loved ones.
She said: “I had my own business, my own house and now I have nothing, it’s so frustrating. But I get by, I just take every day as it comes.
“I love seeing my grandkids but I have to be careful around them too. I have to control it.
“I’ve been studying MRSA for years now learning as much as I can about it.
“It’s highly contagious so I bleach my whole house, I use hand sanitiser everywhere and I use the antibacterial body wash.
“I make sure I eat fruit and veg and make soups and gravies with spices that can help keep infections away. I have to be so careful with any cuts or knocks too.”
Maria now wants antibacterial wash and nasal spray to be more widely-used adding: “It’s a really simple thing but it’s something that helps get rid of MRSA.”
