Man continues to battle rare infection following Hurricane Ian

If you think back to the time immediately following Hurricane Ian, people were concerned about what types of harmful bacteria might be lurking in the flood water. The fear of contracting an infection became a reality for a Lee County man.

His is one of the few reported cases worldwide of mycobacteria so unique that it took months to identify, and he’s still fighting it today.

WINK News health and medical reporter Amy Oshier has his exclusive story.

“All of the property was covered by water,” Ed Lode said.

Driven by the hurricane, Estero Bay washed over Ed and Sue Lode’s neighborhood, flooding homes and everything in its path. The Lodes spent months cleaning up.

“I had a lot of work to do to try to pull the place back together,” Ed said.

Like the rest of Southwest Florida, he rolled up his sleeves and got busy. Never giving thought to the injections he’s recently gotten to ease the pain of carpal tunnel syndrome.

“I got a couple of shots, one between the finger one on the wrist,” he said.

These unrelated actions created a perfect storm for infection.

We had two injection sites and bacteria in the water. And it just was bad timing Ed Lode

Bad timing and the beginning of a month-long ordeal to identify the pathogen that was ripping his skin apart. Even the images are painful to look at.

A single liter of salty water can hold up to a billion bacteria that are natural in the environment. They don’t pose a threat unless they spill into our environment and get access through an entry point in the body.

Lode’s medical mystery was the entry point for Lee Health doctor Johanna Brown. She’s an infectious disease specialist.

“We take care of patients who have very complicated infections,” Dr. Brown said.

With weeping wounds and massive swelling, Ed presented a challenge. Dr. Brown determined it was some type of mycobacterium, but local labs couldn’t identify it.

Ed described the excruciating process of getting answers.

“They had to do surgery to clean out the infection sites and get tissue so they could try to identify the bacteria,” he said.

Dr. Brown said the situation was confounding.

“The smears from the samples that the surgeon sent were positive for the organism, but yet we could not grow it. And that is what was driving everybody crazy,” she said.

In the meantime, Ed was taking a complicated combination of antibiotics.

“About three different drugs, one IV that was extremely powerful, and he was not getting better,” Dr. Brown said.

That’s when she made a decision for which Lode is forever grateful. She reached out to a lab across the country and asked for help.

“And we finally are able to put him on the right regimen combination of three drugs, based on case reports, because you’re not going to see a lot of literature on this particular organism is so rare,” she said.

The course of therapy may take another year. A lagging reminder of Hurricane Ian.

“That’s how we think he got it, from this environmental destruction,” said Dr. Brown.

Without a proper diagnosis and treatment, the infection would have continued to thrive. Instead, his hands are healing.

We are the Sherlock Holmes of internal medicine, and we’re very proud of that because that’s exactly this case Dr. Johanna Brown, Lee Health infectious disease specialist

As life returns to normal, the Lodes are thankful that his recovery is in hand.