The remarkable battle of an Australian Sevens player against a deadly flesh-eating insect

The most remarkable thing in the story of Henry Clunies-Ross is perhaps that he can see the bright side of things.

The Australian winger of the sevices of the University of Sydney and the University of Sydney has spent the last three weeks recovering from a brawl with a rare and deadly flesh eating bacteria that took the lives of one in four people.

He underwent five surgeries, the "nuclear bomb of antibiotics" and regular spells in a hyperbaric chamber to kill him. He is now missing a large piece of skin on the upper part of his leg, which a plastic surgeon used to graft the skin. gaping wound on her right shin.

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But after all the drama, unleashed by a daily tackle in the opening game of the Shute Shield season earlier this month, Clunies-Ross has not lost his sense of humor.

"At least I saved the test," he joked.

"I saw Mack Mason pause, I pursued him, attacked him, hit him at the post." My first thought was, "I hope that he did not marked ", so I did this work.

"But my shin did not look normal, I looked down and that's when I saw a large flap of dangling skin, a pretty nasty cut."

The exposed metal base of the padded post had sliced ​​Clunies-Ross skin and two layers of muscle. An excerpt from the live broadcast shows the speedster lowering his head and grabbing his leg as the skin breaks open.

The break was only the beginning of four scary days that could form the plot of a Netflix horror pilot.

The club's medical staff drove Clunies-Ross to the nearby RPA hospital, where a surgeon cleaned the wound and used more than 100 stitches to close each layer of flesh. He was sent home that night with "a lot of pain" and endured a restless night.

"I woke up in the morning and I was really smart, sweating, shaking, I started vomiting," he recalls. "I tried to get up and I fell, I could not get up."

Clunies-Ross's girlfriend drove him to the Prince of Wales, near his home in Randwick.

"It's pretty fuzzy from there, I remember being lying on the floor in the ER while my wife was trying to explain to them that I was not good," she said. -he declares.

"I do not remember much, a doctor saw me and unrolled all the bandages of the previous night." I told someone that I thought I had spiders on me, so I was comfortable, I was operated on that night. "

The actions of a fast thinking clerk, Nick Haydon, and the urgent calls of Clunies-Ross' mother, head of the nursing unit, probably saved her leg, if not life.

Less than 24 hours after this tackle on Mason, necrotizing fasciitis, an insect they believe sleeping in the grbad of Sydney University's famous No. 2 oval, was already making its way through the healthy tissue of Clunies-Ross's leg.

"It's unusual to see what we saw in him," said Sean Nicklin, head of plastic surgery and reconstruction of the Prince of Wales. "This is a fairly serious infection from which, if there is a delay in the diagnosis, patients can quickly become very sick, become septic and go into shock.

"Even young patients can lose a limb or die, it was a good call from the clerk that day, who saw it in the emergency room, it was less than 24 hours from the initial treatment and it was already very sick, for a young, fit, healthy person who was meaningful. "

Nicklin sees two or three cases of necrotizing fasciitis a year, but the vast majority of them are elderly patients or already suffering from a health problem, such as diabetes. A case like Clunies-Ross is every three or four years.

As fast as the surgeons were able to clean the dying tissue, the infection and its revealing redness continued to spread on the leg at the age of 24 years. "Someone said it was spreading four centimeters an hour," Clunies-Ross said. "I was rather comfortable but the look on the faces of my mother and my dad and my girlfriend said that it was serious."

It took several surgeries, the help of infectious disease specialists, a badtail of antibiotics and regular two-hour sessions in the hyperbaric chamber of Prince of Wales – research suggests that the insect hate oxygen – to kill him once and for all.

Clunies-Ross spent 16 days at the hospital and will miss the rest of a season that he hoped would be his breakthrough after a season in the Top 14 and with the Aussie Sevens program. But he considers himself lucky and is determined to come back stronger than ever.

"I think my legs shaping days are behind me now," he said.

"I did not realize how realistic the scenario of an amputation was, but [the medical staff] were all like "wow, we saved it". I'll bear the scar, I guess. "

The Sydney University Football Clubs and Sydney University Sport and Fitness have expressed hope that Clunies-Ross will recover fully.

"We are always very concerned about the health and well-being of all our athletes," the organizations said in a statement. "Henry is a valued member of the club and we have offered him a range of support and we hope for his full and speedy recovery."