Golden staph: It’s there and it’s on you! | Sally’s Story

Golden staph is a nasty bug and surprisingly common — 8 out of 10 people have it on their skin. If you don’t swab, there’s a danger of injecting it into your bloodstream, which is a good reason to swab. Because as Sally explains, it’s not something you want in your bloodstream!

I actually went to hospital in an ambulance that my flatmate called. Over a period of a couple of weeks, I’d had increasing lower back pain to the extent that one day I said to my flatmate, “I just can’t get out of bed.”

Then for another week or so, it came and went. And I was using quite a bit to mask the pain as well. I really had no idea what it was. I was doing some work as a domestic cleaner and I thought I might have overreached or whatever.

I was bedridden for a couple of days and really in pain and that’s when my flatmate called the ambulance and the paramedics took me to hospital.

That was at the end of May this year, 2022. I don’t even remember walking to the ambulance, let alone the trip in it. I was taking a variety of medications to alleviate the pain that kind of made me really woozy. I was out of it and I was in quite severe pain.

I was quickly diagnosed with an abscess on the spine caused by a golden staph infection in the blood. I just remember waking up in the ward and obviously they’d taken blood and I got the diagnosis that I had the bacteria in the blood. They sent me down for an MRI scan, I think the next day, and it gave them the information they needed about my spine. There was an abscess there and the pain was related to that infection. I was told fairly quickly that it was a long process to get better but that I would recover.

This is what it says on the hospital discharge papers: I “presented with lower back pain in context of current IV drug use and raised inflammatory markers.” Then it goes on to talk about the bacteria and what the effects were on my spine.

I was 6 weeks in hospital and I was pretty much straight away given a Peripherally Inserted Central Catheter (PICC) line and attached to a trolly, which accompanied me everywhere for 6 weeks. I had round the clock floxacillin — intravenous antibiotics — and I’m still on antibiotics until January 2023.

So it was a pretty nasty bug - which they seemed pretty certain was caused by my “unhygienic” drug use. I was open to them about my drug use and they were really pretty good, considering I was using in hospital, and they knew that too.

I was told that probably 80% of people have golden staph infection on their skin, which I had no idea of. I knew it was virulent but didn’t know it was so prevalent. I injected it off my skin and into my bloodstream. I know I was careless — I probably didn’t swab properly. And I did reinject myself with a fit that had a bit of blood in it — my own blood — and that’s possibly what did it.

The idea that this golden staph is commonly found on people’s skin is a pretty scary thing for IV drug users because we’re injecting through our skin into our bloodstream every day.

That knowledge was like “Wow!” It kind of blew me away. And that it can lead to osteomyelitis. It has in my case. I don’t really know what the long-term effects will be but I’m 63, so it’s probably not a great thing to have at my age.

It has caused me a lot of pain and anxiety and feeling like I wasn’t ever going to get better. I couldn’t bend down. I couldn’t pull my undies up. The hospital was pretty good with the pain meds. I was OK once I was in a position but when I tried to move to a different position, it was like a sciatic-type effect. It was pretty scary because I’d never had that type of pain for that long and it took weeks for me to feel like I was making any progress.

My mobility was still reduced quite markedly when I got out of hospital. For example, walking off a kerb on the road was painful. To get onto a bus was still very painful. But after about a 2½ month period, I was really starting to feel pretty good and I feel like I’m pretty much recovered now. I’ve recovered my mobility, but it seemed like such a long time.

I know I wasn’t using swabs a great deal at the time I got the infection and I was doing domestic cleaning in some quite filthy places. Now I am more conscious of it. I try to be more prepared. I am more vigilant.

When you’re IV drug using, I think the swabbing thing is probably the most important. And the sterile fits, for sure. Re-using my own fit (I hadn’t shared it with anyone else) may have been how I got infected.

It’s a wake-up call and I think something people should be made aware of it. You know that if you’ve got dirt on your skin, there will be bacteria there. But we don’t think about what we don’t see. Golden staph is really quite common on people’s skin — but invisible. It’s there and it’s on you! Realising golden staph was such a common thing really freaked me out because I thought it was something people only got when they go to hospital.

Golden staph infection is a scary thing to shift. It took 3 to 6 months of hardcore antibiotics. It was essentially gone from my system after 3 days but they keep you on the antibiotics for that long because it’s that virulent.

I’m not really sure of the long-term effects of having 3000-4000mg of antibiotics in my system every day for six months. But it obviously offsets the danger of basically just a few cells of the bacteria, that mightn’t even show up in the blood test, that could be there and if you’re not vigilant with your antibiotics, it can come back quickly, apparently. I know I am also going to be vigilant with my injecting routine from now on as well. I’m not risking that again.