Days after returning home from a Punta Cana vacation, Marie Trainer called out of work with a backache and nausea. Then her temperature spiked and dropped, sending her to a local Stark County, Ohio, emergency room in the early hours of May 11.
When Trainer woke in a hospital bed nine days later, her hands and legs had been amputated.
It took doctors seven days to discover Trainer incurred a severe infection, not from a “tropical” travel disease as they first suspected, but from her German shepherd’s kisses.
Trainer contracted a rare infection from the bacteria capnocytophaga canimorsus, probably when her German shepherd puppy, Taylor, licked an open cut.