A MUM has begged doctors to cut off her left arm after a tiny scratch left her fighting for her life. Jade Harle, 32, injured herself in 2018 and has lived with an excruciating wound on her limb ever since. She has no skin left on her arm, leaving her vulnerable to constant infection and […]
A MUM has begged doctors to cut off her left arm after a tiny scratch left her fighting for her life.
Jade Harle, 32, injured herself in 2018 and has lived with an excruciating wound on her limb ever since.
She has no skin left on her arm, leaving her vulnerable to constant infection and battling sepsis and “on death’s door” several times.
Because she is so often ill with sepsis, which can be deadly within hours, doctors say they are unable to remove her arm.
Jade, from Gillingham, Kent, is now asking strangers to help fund a £40,000 private operation so she can stop living in fear and agony.
She told The Mirror: “There’s no end in sight and that’s a hard thing to live with. I just want this over.
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“Every day I wake up scared and it’s frightening. I am fighting for my life. I’m just not me at all.”
Four years ago, Jade’s arm became injured when she saved someone from drowning as a RNLI lifeboat medic.
Her arm was scratched by something in the water and at hospital, she was given a tetanus shot and antibiotics as a precaution.
But she never imagined that such a small wound would ruin her life.
Jade thought the scratch was healing but it became infected over the weeks following the incident, developing large black ulcers.
Six weeks after the scratch, she was speaking to her mum when she suddenly said she felt desperately ill and passed out.
Jade said: “My mum phoned an ambulance, I was totally out of it, I’d lost four pints of blood, they didn’t know how, as I wasn’t bleeding.
“I had sepsis and I was really frightened.”
Sepsis occurs when the body starts attacking itself by mistake, as an overreaction to an infection.
As it progresses, healthy tissues including the organs and skin start to die, which can lead to amputation, organ failure and potentially death.
Jade said: “They said to me we are going to have to amputate your arm. This was all within three or four hours of arriving.
“I said can we just wait and see and have some time to think.
“I thought I can try to fight this, I didn’t want to lose my arm.”
Doctors cleaned the infected wound on her arm and removed any rotting tissue.
Jade, who feared losing her arm at the time, said it looked like someone had tried to scoop the insides of her arm out with a spoon.
But her ordeal wasn’t over, as in the four years since, Jade has been hospitalised with sepsis eight times.
Each time she has fought for her life.
It has been discovered that Jade has pyoderma gangrenosum, a rare immune condition that causes painful ulcers.
These ulcers can develop rapidly on their own or around an injury.
Sometimes it may be caused by minor skin damage such as a needle prick or an insect bite, the NHS says.
Due to her condition, Jade says skin grafts have not worked because her body simply attacks the flesh, and creates new ulcers.
In hindsight, she regrets refusing the arm amputation back in 2018, and says the move to scoop out the tissue in her arm would have accelerated her pyoderma gangrenosum.
Jade is stuck in a vicious cycle, as she cannot have amputation while she has sepsis, but is vulnerable to infections that cause sepsis while she still has her arm.
She has spent the past eight months of the year in hospital, with only a few minutes of visitation per day.
The mum-of-one has barely been able to see her 12-year-old son, who is being cared for by his grandparents.
Jade said: “We have lost four years. He has special needs, so doesn’t really understand.
“They [his grandparents] bring him in most days to see me for a couple of minutes, but I just want to be a mum again.”
Jade has started a GoFundMe page to get private treatment, which would first involve reducing her immune system to stop her body attacking itself.
If the operation can be done by the NHS she is looking to fund a prosthetic arm.
Jade wrote: “4 years after that first small cut, it’s been the same story, pain every second of the day, infection after infection.
“There’s only so much one person can endure, my body will continue to attack itself but with the arm removed I might stand a chance at a decent recovery.
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“I’m on super strong painkillers and constantly sick because I have a nerve exposed on my wrist, we’re getting nowhere fast and the risk of getting sepsis again is so high.
“Ive been on deaths door 8 times now, my son is 12 and I’ve watched most of the last 4 years of his life from a hospital bed [sic].”
