She developed a deep open wound on her calf that had grown to the size of a saucer. Four smaller lesions were also present.
The larger wound drained fluid that appeared to be infected. It had gotten progressively worse over the past month.
Luckily, the woman’s roommate persuaded her to go to the ER and Dr. Nadine Stanojevic, who was in her last year of an internal medicine residency, was the doctor who evaluated her.
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The woman indicated she had had small painful abscesses in the past
that would open, drain and resolve but this one just grew larger. She had been washing and dressing the wound daily and using antibiotic cream but it did not seem to help. The pain had increased over the last two weeks and the woman now found it excruciating to even stand.
The doctor started the woman on IV Vancomycin, a powerful antibiotic used to treat methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) since it was presumed that was the bacteria causing the infection.
MRSA is a serious infection that causes abscesses to form on the skin and is resistant to many antibiotics.
Three days later, the wound did not look any better and the wound cultures that were taken before starting the antibiotics did not show MRSA was present.
This was the moment when the doctor wondered if perhaps it was not a wound infection at all.
Stanojevic remembered a patient she had cared for as an intern who had a similar wound infection that did not respond to antibiotics. That patient had been found to have pyoderma gangrenosum, “a rare and somewhat mysterious skin disease.”
Pyoderma gangrenosum is an autoimmune disease where the body’s immune system turns on itself as if it is being invaded. It occurs mostly frequently in those with certain inflammatory diseases such as Crohn’s disease, hepatitis and some types of arthritis. It develops most commonly on the trunk.
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