A mother-of-three had half of her face sliced off after developing a potentially deadly infection after whacking her head on her oven.
Donna Corden, 46, of Leeds, knocked herself out during the incident earlier this year and sustained a small cut above her left eyebrow.
Within just 24 hours, her face turned a frightening shade of black and she became delirious and dizzy. She was rushed to hospital.
Doctors diagnosed her with necrotising fasciitis – a flesh-eating bug that often kills. Her children were told to ‘prepare for the worst’.
Surgeons were able to cut away the rotten flesh to keep her alive, but days later she went onto develop sepsis and her life hung in the balance.
Her body went into organ failure and she was placed in an induced coma so she could recover, she was pumped full of antibiotics.
Speaking for the first time since recovering, Ms Corden, who has had skin grafted from her lower limbs onto her face, said: ‘I’m alive. It could be worse.’
‘Yes, it is difficult. I could wonder why it happened to me, but there would be no point. It was amazing. I couldn’t believe I was alive.’
When did the incident happen?
Ms Corden, who is currently on sick leave, said that her legs gave way, because of her arthritis, as she stood in the kitchen in January this year.
Knocking herself out on the oven, her son David Lawton, 24, discovered that she was unconscious sometime later.
Ms Corden added: ‘I had a nasty cut and there was blood everywhere. I didn’t want to go to hospital, so David called a doctor and butterfly strips were put across the cut.’
The next day, her cut began turning a frightening shade of black.
