TAVARES, Fla. – Fresh off his release from the hospital, Bobby Henderson stood by the boat ramp where he contracted a rare bacterial infection, cracking jokes about the most harrowing two weeks of his life.
“(I’m) using up my nine lives,” Henderson joked.
News 6 interviewed Henderson a few days after he was discharged from AdventHealth in Tavares, where he spent six days receiving medical treatment for Edwardsiella Tarda, a pathogen rarely found in humans.
“I probably could’ve lost my life because I didn’t realize how bad this bacteria is,” he said.
Henderson said he was taking his jet ski out during the afternoon of Saturday, May 17. He said his jet ski drifted, and when he walked on some rocks in the water to try to retrieve it, he slipped.
“I tried to walk across the rocks, and I slipped on about the second or third rock and busted my shin open on one of the rocks,” Henderson recalled.
The scratch on his leg didn’t cause alarm, so Henderson continued his day out on the water, went home, and washed the wound.
“About 24 hours later, the next day, on a Sunday, I woke up from a nap with excruciating pain and a fever,” Henderson said. “And the only thing I can think of is from the rock.”
Henderson went to the hospital two days later. He said the staff presumed it was a bacterial infection, but did not have much reason for concern. They sent him home with antibiotics.
“That Wednesday, the pain got worse,” he recounted. Henderson woke up his wife early Thursday morning and told her he needed to go to the emergency room.
What followed was six days of treatment in the hospital.
“I spent six days in the ER,” he said. “IV antibiotics every day. They ended up doing a wound culture on it, where they found out what the bacteria was.”
The results displayed a bacterium that Henderson didn’t know how to pronounce: Edwardsiella Tarda.
“They’ve never heard of it before,” Henderson said of the staff. “They never had a case in there with it.”
Henderson lauded the work done by the staff at AdventHealth, especially the medical director who supervised his treatment.
Henderson underwent surgery so medical staff could remove an abscess from his wound. A few hours before the interview with News 6 Friday, he said he had the wound scraped. He shared pictures, which show a hole the size of an egg in his leg.
“This is probably one of the closest injuries that’s scared me,” he said.
Henderson recalled staff mentioning that if he had waited a day or two longer to seek treatment, he might have lost his leg.
“It usually causes infection in fish,” said Dr. Jay Ladde, emergency medicine physician at Orlando Health ORMC and senior associate program director of emergency medicine. “It rarely causes infection in humans.”
Dr. Ladde did not treat Henderson and had not association with his case, but he offered News 6 insight into Edwardsiella Tarda.
“Edwardsiella is usually water-borne,” he said. “(A wound) can cause a pretty minor infection. It can cause a pretty significant infection where it gets deeper into the tissue.”
Usually one who tends to withstand a lot of pain, Henderson said he is grateful he listened to his body and sought help.
“I was just trying to save my leg,” he said.