11 hours ago
My doctor used a dirty needle during common procedure - it left me with agonising 'suicide disease'
A former primary school teacher has been left with a rare condition dubbed 'suicide disease' after a doctor re-used a dirty needle during a common procedure.
Amy Pohl, now 32, from Warwickshire, visited her GP for help with a cough that doctors suspected was a respiratory infection, and referred her to the local hospital.
Ms Pohl should have made a full recovery following a course of steroids to help reduce the swelling in her airways.
However, the hospital medic failed to properly insert a cannula—a thin tube inserted into the vein to administer the medication— leading to an infection.
The infection was supposedly caused by a doctor incorrectly using the same needle in both her arms, without properly sterilising the skin, after numerous failed attempts to insert the tube.
Ms Pohl believes this infection eventually triggered a debilitating condition that causes agonising pain in the limbs.
Called complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS), the problem is the body's over-reaction to an injury, and can also cause the hands, feet and legs to seize up and become extremely swollen.
The medics' oversight left Ms Pohl partially paralysed and in excruciating pain.
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CRPS is dubbed suicide disease because of how many sufferers take their life after developing the condition.
Ms Pohl said the excruciating pain she endured felt like she was being 'stabbed by a hundred shards of burning glass', as doctors scrambled for answers.
Recalling the initial problem that led her to seek help in November 2017, Ms Pohl said she put her sore throat down to end of term exhaustion.
But a GP eventually diagnosed croup—an infection that usually affects children, causing a distinct 'barking' cough.
Croup is usually caused by a contagious virus such as parainfluenza, which is spread through contaminated air droplets when an infected person coughs or sneezes.
When Ms Pohl arrived at hospital, doctors performed an endoscopy—where a camera is passed up the nose and down the throat—to better visualise the harm caused by the infection.
Unfortunately Ms Pohl suffered a severe allergic reaction to the anesthetising spray they had used to numb the area, which led to an admission to a high dependency unit.
Not long after her admission, Ms Pohl said her doctor attempted to insert a cannula into her arm to administer medication directly into her bloodstream to treat the infection.
'The doctor only brought one cannula into the room,' Ms Pohl recalled in a YouTube video.
'He put the needle into my arm and then without cleaning the skin or the needle he tried my wrist.
'His whole mask was steaming up and my dad said to him "shouldn't you be using a new needle?" He shouted at my dad and told him to leave the room.
'Then he went over to the other arm and that's when he put it into my hand. And he tried and tried and tried. Because of all that, I developed an infection.'
'The chance of someone getting an infection if a needle is reused in their own body is really slim', she said, 'but it happens that I was that one in a million'.
Ms Pohl's hand and wrist then began to swell. The pain got so bad that it would radiate up her arm and into her abdomen, stopping her from eating.
Unbeknown to both her and her doctors at the time, she was experiencing the onset of CRPS.
According to the NHS, the skin of the affected body part can become so sensitive that even a slight touch or change in temperature can cause intense pain.
Affected areas can also become swollen, stiff or undergo fluctuating changes in colour or temperature.
'No matter how many weeks went by after the surgeries, my hand was just getting worse not better,' Ms Pohl recalled in an Instagram video.
Ms Pohl eventually diagnosed with CRPS in 2018 and has since been campaigning on social media to raise better awareness for the condition, resolved to 'stop fighting [herself] and start fighting for [herself]'.
The content creator, who has 3.7million followers on TikTok now makes upbeat videos about her diagnoses, in a bid to spread awareness about the dangers of re-using needles.
Through an extensive physiotherapy regime, Ms Pohl now has a better range of movement in her hand and wrist, and is starting to gain back her independence.
According to the NHS, while the condition is usually triggered by an injury, the resulting pain can last for years.
In addition to chronic pain, CRPS can also cause a range of other symptoms including strange sensations in the affected limb—almost as if it doesn't belong to the rest of the body—joint stiffness and swelling, tremors and muscle spasms and insomnia.
In some cases, it can even cause the muscles to waste away, restricting suffers range of movement until they can no longer live unassisted.
The prevalence of the condition is still unclear, however it is estimated that up to 3,800 people in the UK develop CRPS each year.
