A little 8-year-old boy from Oregon tragically passed away a couple of days after he fell off his bike. Liam Flanagan took a nasty fall in the local streets of Pilot Rock closeby the family home. The handlebar of his bike ruptured his jeans and cut his thigh deeply.
Liam’s parents took him to the emergency room to get stitches, but he still had a massive amount of pain around the wound even after a doctor treated him.
When Liam’s mother Sara took him to the hospital after he fell off his bike, the doctor didn’t think that antibiotics would be necessary because the injury wasn’t severe enough.
“He said it hurt, but it was his very first accident, and he never had stitches before,” she mentioned to People.
The family returned to the hospital a couple of days later because Liam kept complaining about the severe pain. Liam’s parents also noticed that the skin around the wound was completely discolored and had a reddish and purple tint.
Doctors discovered that Liam was infected with necrotizing fasciitis, rare flesh-eating bacteria.
The bacteria is immensely dangerous and likely infected Liam’s open wound via the soil. The flesh-eating bacteria are known to spread incredibly quickly and damage the body’s tissue with no hopes of recovery. In a case like this, time is absolutely essential.
Liam immediately underwent surgery and doctors did everything they could to stop the bacteria from spreading.
The little boy had to be airlifted to another children’s hospital in Portland. The bacteria had already spread quite far, and doctors were forced to amputate limbs and parts of Liam’s body. They had hoped that the amputations would stop the spreading and save his life, but the infection had already spread too far and was too aggressive to stop.
They spent hours trying to get rid of the infection by cutting it out, but it was already too late. Horribly, Liam passed away shortly after the surgery.
“Almost his whole right side was gone,” Sara said to the East Oregonian. “They kept cutting and hoping. Cutting and hoping.”
Liam’s parents are absolutely heartbroken and hope that Liam’s story can remind other parents to be wary of discolored and abnormally warm body tissue around wounds. Other symptoms of necrotizing fasciitis are fever, fatigue, vomiting and sudden chills.
“Even though this is my worst nightmare, I want to believe his death had a reason, it had a purpose,” Liam’s mom told People. “Maybe it’s to save other’s lives because no one deserves to go through what we went through.”
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