Narcotic opioids heroin, fentanyl and carfentanil were responsible for more than 64,000 drug overdose deaths in 2016 and the drug crisis continues to grow across the country. In Ohio people are dying from accidental opioid overdose deaths more often than from car accidents, with an estimated 14 dying each day. As the rate of drug use increases in rural Ohio, the number of life-threatening MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) and chronic hepatitis C infections are on the rise among people who use shared needles.
Stephanie Ottesen arrived at the Clinton County Memorial Hospital emergency department overwhelmed with pain in 2015.
“I thought, because I had been using a little bit of meth, but I was mostly a heroin addict, I had been staying up for days and I thought it was related to that meth and I just needed sleep. But then I had to take my jacket off at the hospital and the nurses saw my arm and I had open sores on my arm,” said Ottesen.
The open sores, near her wrist, remained covered most of the time. Ottesen said she was trying to hide the infection and described how it was caused by using shared syringes when she injected heroin or methamphetamine with her friends in her hometown of Blanchester.
“They knew right away that it was MRSA and rushed me in for treatment,” said Ottesen.
She spent hours in the emergency department. She learned that the multi-drug resistant MRSA had spread into the valves around her heart. Ottesen was placed into a Warren County nursing home for three months and said she was treated with a strong antibiotic, vancomycin, to kill the MRSA bacteria. Ottesen said she thought she was going to die from the MRSA infection but over time the antibiotic healed her heart.
She will always be a carrier for MRSA and will have to cope with having permanent skin abscesses and high blood pressure. Losing a piece of the skin on her arm from MRSA was traumatic, she said, and it wasn’t the last time she would rush to the emergency department to be seen for overwhelming pain.
Additional tests during her stay at the nursing home confirmed the MRSA infection was co-morbid with the hepatitis C virus, Ottesen said. Hepatitis C is transmitted primarily through contact with blood and using shared needles when injecting drugs. Recent research has shown that the hepatitis C virus can also survive outside of the body on surfaces for three weeks, with some research reportedly showing that it can remain active for six weeks. Hepatitis C infections increased 1,000 percent nationally in the period between 2011-15, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports, and the CDC attributed the growth to the opioid crisis in counties across the country.
“I was having pain in my back near my liver. I couldn’t walk. I went back to the hospital and the hospital did a CAT scan — they called me back saying there was a spot on my liver,” said Ottesen.
Ottesen said she was surprised by how suddenly the permanent damage set in once she had become infected with the pathogens. Left untreated, hepatitis C becomes a chronic disease that can possibly cause liver cancer or the kidneys to shut down.