Ex-lawyer’s horror as she woke to find leg alive with MAGGOTS leading to double amputation that ended career
Victoria Abbott Fleming
A young lawyer was forced to have both her legs amputated after she awoke to find sores around her ankles crawling with maggots.
Victoria Abbott-Fleming, now 40, had fallen down a set of stairs at work and thought she had suffered just bruising and cuts.
But her leg became so infected that it swelled to triple in size, had weeping ulcers and smelled like ‘rotting meat’.
Her condition deteriorated so badly that she woke one morning to find her wounds swarming with maggots.
‘I screamed the house down,’ she said. ‘There were thousands of them. I felt physically sick. I felt dirty, like I had rotting flesh. I wanted my leg off there and then.
She said: ‘Anything that touched me felt like rubbing sandpaper on an open wound. By this point it was swelling so much it had split.
‘It stunk to high heaven, you could smell me from one hundred metres away. I just cried and cried.’
At her lowest, desperate Victoria admitted she had even considered suicide.
‘I just couldn’t cope anymore; the smell, the pain.’
Eventually medics decided to amputate and by the end of 2006, aged 27, Victoria had her right leg removed below the knee.
Victoria and her husband won a £2.1million pay-out from the college following the fall but said much of the cost had to go on medical care and converting their home
