It is my strong suspicion that the chemo he got destroyed his immune system and allowed infections to kill him.

The infections got the upper hand perhaps not just because he  had chemo but because the interventions he underwent: needles, tubes, drainage, multiple needlesticks where one was needed but missed.

The infections he got needed more than one antibiotic to overcome.  He had drug-resistant strains of something or other.  This isn't hard to explain.  His initial procedure required a max of four tubes going into his body and staying there for three hours.  The incisions (cuts to allow access) in his body were kept open for the entire time.  Even if the equipment was entirely sterile the human bodies hovering around him were not.  Even doctors who wash carefully and put on packaged sterile gloves do not necessarily scrub down their faces, exposed above and below the mask.  Still more likely were disease floating around in the most dangerous place on Earth:  hospitals. 

Secretlife proclaimed she was staying away from doctors as much as possible and I share her strategy.  This is not a matter of fear so much as survival.  Sick people go to doctors and a healthy number of them expect success from the medical arts.  I am far less sanguine about their capabilities.  The optimists ask for and accept from drug-pushing doctors the latest and greatest pharmaceuticals that they've seen on TV commercials.  These commercials hawk medicines that are patented and make the most money for drug companies which allows them to purchase commercial time to make people think the drugs are BETTER rather than more profitable.  (see Consumer Reports for pretty good advice on effective (and often CHEAPER) drugs:  http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/health-fitness/index.htm.)

One of the drugs these faithful ask for is antibiotics.  They are deaf to the warnings about these beasts.  Antibiotics stop bacteria from growing.  Commonly, they affect ALL bacteria including those in our digestive tract; primarily Escherichia Coli (colloquially, E. Coli).  When you take antibiotics, you slow down the growth of intestinal bacteria.  Of the millions in there, ONE will have a genetic makeup less susceptible to the antibiotic and reproduce more than the average.  These bacteria become more plentiful and leave our bodies through feces.  In hospitals, this is often collected in bedpans and transported through various rooms before they are cleaned.  Can some get smeared on hands, carts, doorknobs?  Normally this may not be a big deal.  E.Coli are genetically designed to thrive in the colon, not the bloodstream.  You get in trouble when you eat it in a contaminated burger not if some gets in a cut.

Bacteria that like living in blood can become antibiotic resistant too, but generally, the bacteria stop reproducing which allows the body to overwhelm them.  The few that are resistant cannot divide enough to escape the body's onslaught.  This is the happy ending.

It gets worse.  Bacteria have sex.  We picture them as splitting themselves, and that IS how they reproduce, but they change through something close to sex.  While bacteria have nuclei like we do, they can share DNA through rings of genes called cosmids.  Bacteria make copies of these to share with its split selves.  They can then pass these to one another through tubes they grow out from themselves.  These cosmids are often the source of the DNA that protect them from antibiotics.  Now they get to not only be antibiotic resistant themselves, but can share it with genetically different bacteria.  Perhaps a strain that's already resistant to a different antibiotic.  This is commonly the way multiple resistance is bred into bacteria.

Now the clincher.
People sick enough to be hospitalized get antibiotics.  These sick people often have compromised immune systems that cannot fight off disease weakened by antibiotics. 
All you need at this point is someone who has a drug resistant blood germ to start bleeding into their stool.  Guess what?  It happens constantly.
Now the blood-borne disease is mixed with E.Coli from the intestine that has been perfecting its resistance to antibiotics perhaps for months.  These little nasties are all too happy to inject antibiotic resistant cosmids into the blood-loving newcomers and VOILA! antibiotic resistant blood disease.  From the bedpans they may get spread in small amounts elsewhere and over the long haul become ubiquitous in the entire hospital building..  If you don't read medical lit much, you may not realize that doctors know about this and they have no answer for it.  They don't put it this way but, they are SCARED.

Staphylococcus Aureus is the biggie, but other contenders are coming up especially new enemies from the deserts of Iraq.  Young men blown apart by IEDs are given potent cocktails of antibiotics and the germ is breeding itself into indestructibility at German hospitals that treat them and then send them home to start infiltrating Walter Reed.   Medical personnel commonly move from military to civilian government installations like NIH and from there to educational hospitals and from there to public facilities.  With all these visitors crossing paths, it's easy to see how staph is a problem at every hospital you'll find and the new Iraqi disease is next.

Americans today surrender civil liberties and quake in fear if a man in a turban boards a bus with them.  I don't share their fear of mass transit.  20 people spent years preparing to kill 3500 people.  The black plague took out 40 million.

Don't fear getting on a plane.  Worry about going to the hospital.

Now how does this have anything to do with me and my health?  (The supposed subject of this blog)

I'd tell you, but I've run out of space for this week.  (Sorry Secret, I was wrong.  Next week, I promise.)

*DM

 

Blood Pressure:  127/69  9-2007