Max Armstrong was just moving a hot frying pan from the campfire to the table.
It was December 2, 2024, and the 40-year-old hiker was camping with friends in Kiowa, Colorado. He burned his thumb, applied antibiotic cream, bandaged it, and continued his trip. Two days later, his left ankle started hurting, and he thought he had sprained it getting out of the camper. The burn, meanwhile, wasn’t healing.
Six days passed before he started talking incoherently in his sleep and noticed his toenails turning purple. On the way to the hospital, he searched his symptoms online and suspected he had sepsis. The doctors confirmed that group A strep had entered through the burn. They put him in a medically induced coma for six days.
When he woke up on December 13, his feet were completely black. The tissue had died, and the necrosis was spreading up his legs. On December 23, both his legs were amputated below the knees in a three-hour operation.
The lesson is simple: a wound that isn’t getting better, combined with an unusual symptom elsewhere in the body, is more than enough reason to go to the ER immediately.
