Unexpected in The Gambia

A shortish post as I could write a full book on this. Some images may be quite graphic.

30th November, our caravan packed up and put away into storage for the winter and off we go to Birmingham Airport for a 3 month volunteering trip to The Gambia. For the first week we stayed with a local charity, having a look at the the charity work they do. Our plan was to work with the local bird/nature reserve who are having various environmental problems, training up the locals and doing a few talks in the schools. We had rented a house for the rest of our stay and employed a friend to live in with us to help with the cooking and teach us how to cook Gambian food.

After a few days I noticed a blister forming on my toe and thought nothing of it, slowly my foot began to ache so I took a few pain killers. The next day I started to feel sleepy around lunchtime and fell asleep. The next morning I woke up covered in sweat, shivering and bad diarrhoea after a bad night so rang around and found a hospital around 30 miles away. I was lifted into a taxi by two large men and transported to the hospital, where they immediately admitted me with cellulitis on my leg and severe sepsis, temperatures of 39.7 degrees. I only found out recently from a doctor that I probably only had a few hours left before the infection spread around the rest of my body, but was saved by having powerful antibiotics injected straight into my blood which was a bit more than painful as I felt like my veins were burning.

After 12 days in a Gambian hospital I was let out back to our house (Christmas Eve) to sort out flights with out insurance to get me back to the UK for further treatment. I had to sit with my leg up, indoors for the next 2 weeks. We flew back to the UK on 10th January and was taken to hospital where I spent a further 2 weeks whilst various doctors tried to work out what had happened to me (it is still a mystery as to what started it off, probably a spider bite).

Maggots eating dead skin

Maggots finished.

Ready for skin graft

By this time a large patch of dead skin had formed so I was advised to try maggot treatment for 3 days, I thought I would give it a go as I was in enough pain anyway so it could not make it any worse. The maggots were added (400 of them) and the next day when the dressing was taken off an improvement could be seen as they had already eaten half of the dead skin. Around half of the maggots were removed as they had grown quite a lot of the rest were covered back up. 2 days later all the dead skin had gone, leaving a hole in my foot.

More antibiotics and a vac pump was fitted to try and start the healing off. A few days later and another improvement, and I was told that I could have a skin graft.

Almost 8 weeks on and I am still sitting with my leg up and a successful skin graft, should be able to start trying to walk again in about another week.

As we had to depart almost 2 months early from The Gambia, we never got chance to do any work so I am trying to raise money to buy equipment for the schools and also to give to the hospital who helped me out as they were short on medicines and equipment.

I have a donations page, if anyone would like to donate towards our fundraising, as we are hoping to get back out to Gambia towards the end of the year to carry on our work there, please visit our fundraising page: http://i8565.wixsite.com/mysite/about