Peggy Lillis was a healthy single mom raising two boys and working extra jobs on the weekend. All that ended on April 21, 2010, when an ICU doctor told her son Liam that his mom, who had been healthy just a week earlier, was dead from a Clostridioides difficile infection (CDI).
CDI is a colon infection associated with antibiotic use and caused by the bacterium Clostridioides difficile (C. diff). Each year in the United States, C. diff infects about 500,000 people and kills approximately 29,000.
Peggy Lillis’s Story
Lillis’s son Liam told her story on the foundation’s website. The story states that after Lillis separated from her husband, she earned her associate degree and bachelor’s degree and worked as a waitress. She became an elementary school teacher and a homeowner, and she began to work on her master’s degree.On April 13, 2010, she had a root canal and was prescribed Clindamycin, an antibiotic, to treat an abscess.
Two days later, she came home from work not feeling well. She normally never stayed home from work.
She continued to stay in bed throughout the weekend. On Tuesday, April 20, her son Christian was supposed to take her to a doctor’s appointment, but she was pale and weak, and he wanted to take her to the hospital. Due to concern about dehydration, he called 911.
Christian called his brother Liam from the hospital and told him to come there. Their mother was diagnosed with a massive infection, later found to be CDI, brought on by the antibiotics. She was in septic shock.
She did not improve as the doctor hoped. They performed surgery to remove her colon to get rid of the infection, but her vital signs deteriorated soon after the surgery.
This Could Have Been Prevented
“My mom was a healthy 56-year-old woman,” Liam told the Epoch Times. “It would have been so simple to stop if the person prescribing the antibiotic educated us that catching C. diff could be a possibility.”He said that C. diff kills twice as many people as AIDS in the U.S. every year, but AIDS must be reported on a death certificate, whereas C. diff does not have to be listed as the cause of death on a certificate.
He believes there needs to be a more comprehensive tracking system for C. diff.
When a person receives an antibiotic for an infection, especially a broad-spectrum antibiotic such as Clindamycin, the one Peggy Lillis took, it kills off not only the bad bacteria but also the good bacteria in the person’s gut.
If the person is exposed to C. diff, for example from feces in a hospital setting due to a nurse or doctor not washing his or her hands properly, the person’s gut does not have enough good bacteria to fight off the infection. This is when it can spread.
Treatments
A person who is diagnosed with CDI is first given a different antibiotic, oral Vancomycin, which was developed to only kill C. diff in the gut. IV Vancomycin will not help.This treatment does not work for everyone. A more expensive antibiotic, Dificid, can be used, but most insurance companies will not cover it. It may cost up to $20,000 for 20 pills.
The final treatment, except in severe cases when one’s colon is removed, is giving the person a fecal transplant.
A fecal transplant, or FMT, is when healthy stool of a matched donor is given to the CDI patient through an ng tube or by a colonoscopy, and the healthy stool helps the gut start to grow healthy bacteria that can fight off the C. diff infection.
According to the Mayo Clinic, the FMT procedure has been found to have a success rate of over 85 percent in preventing CDI from recurring, whereas antibiotics have a 40 to 50 percent success rate.
Other things that doctors may try with patients is giving them strong probiotics, which help keep the bacteria in the gut healthy. The use of a three-strain Lactobacillus probiotic significantly improved rates of healthcare-associated CDI.
