Cat bite nearly costs Palmer woman her arm

WASILLA — Vicky Jo Baker tried to lend a hand to a stray cat at Hatcher Pass and now likely will never regain full use of her right hand.

But it could have been much worse. She could have lost her arm — or even her life — if her friend hadn’t taken her to the emergency room at Mat-Su Regional Medical Center two days after being bitten by a calico near the boarded-up Motherlode Lodge on Jan. 25.

“You never think something like that will happen to you,” Baker, 43, said while still recovering at the Palmer hospital Friday. “I had no idea a cat bite could go to this severity.”

Baker’s three puncture wounds on the top of her hand became so infected by the bacteria from the cat’s mouth, mere oral antibiotics given to her by her Wasilla doctor near Arby’s the next day were not sufficient to combat the spreading menace.

“The pain was so unbearable,” Baker said. “I began to realize that I should have gone to the hospital right away.”

Her friend of 21 years, Roberta Kirsch, knew exactly how serious such a wound could be because her own daughter, Holley Haag, was bitten by the family cat, Chaos, four years ago when she was 10.

A school nurse alerted Kirsch to the need to take Holley to a doctor for antibiotic shots as soon as possible after her hand swelled, turned increasingly red and its veins became noticeably pronounced, but to this day Holley cannot fully straighten the fingers on that hand.

“I learned that people can actually die from such an infection if it’s not treated soon enough,” Kirsch said Friday. “It scared me to death. But it wasn‘t the cat’s fault. We still love him. Holley just got in the middle of a squabble among our animals that day and Chaos bit her pinky.”

The irony of it all is that it was Kirsch who had taken her friend Vicky Jo for a drive to get some fresh air after she’d endured emergency surgery the week before for a herniated growth on her ovaries.

It was a beautiful day at Hatcher Pass and they were heading back down the hill toward Palmer-Fishhook Road when they noticed a full-grown calico wandering around in an area devoid of people.

“We love animals and figured someone had taken the cat up there and abandoned it,” Kirsch explained. “We got it to come close to us and Vicky Jo picked it up and started to get it into the car and it freaked out and bit her right hand. The cat then ran away and we ran away.”

Although the wounds were a little deep, they weren’t “gushing blood or anything,” Kirsch said. So she just dropped Baker at home and went about her day.

When her friend called the next day to tell her that her entire hand was swollen and she was in excruciating pain, Kirsch told her she needed to get some antibiotics right away — just as her daughter had four years before. However, Baker — and apparently her usual doctor — didn’t understand she needed more than the pill form of medication to combat the dangerous infection.

Wasilla veterinarian Hilary Petit explained Friday that because cats can carry a variety of potentially fatal bacteria in their mouths such as pasteurella multocida and salmonella, humans have to be especially careful if that bacteria is transferred to them through a bite wound — especially on their hands.

“Because the hand is such a complicated structure with tendons and ligaments and tissues so close together, if an infection gets into the tissue plain or joints, the situation can become quite serious quite fast,” Petit said. “Cats that are hunters also can pass on bacteria from their prey. But cats are not evil. They are great little animals. You just have to be careful if you’re bitten.”

Because Baker’s infection had spread down her arm by the time she received proper treatment at the hospital, she’s had to endure a variety of unsettling procedures, including five surgeries, frequent dressing changes, around-the-clock suctioning of fluids seeping from her open carpal tunnel and physical therapy. She’s also confined to her room because of the danger of exposing her wounds to further infections.

“Thank goodness I have insurance,” said Baker, who works as a road construction laborer in the summer. “I haven’t seen my bill yet, but I’m guessing it’s up to half a million. And I don’t know when I’m going to get out of here.”

Baker said doctors might have to resort to skin grafts to close up her arm if her own skin doesn’t grow back quickly enough. They’ve been hooking up electrodes to her arm to try to get her muscles to “talk” to her tendons and her elbow to talk to her hand, she said.

“I can’t use my hand at all,” the right-hander said. “I can’t form a fist or raise my hand up. I can barely grab a fork, but then I can’t twist my wrist enough to get it to my mouth. It’s very frustrating!”

The first thing she’ll do when she does get out, she said, is pay a visit to the doctor behind Arby’s to let him know he should have immediately sent her to the hospital for intravenous antibiotics instead of pills.

“I feel he really let me down,” she said of the doctor.

The good news is, she won’t need that carpal tunnel syndrome surgery she was scheduled to have the same day she entered the emergency room Jan. 27.

“It was weird how that timing worked out,” she laughed. “But I will never have another cat again in my life. I like cats, but after what I’ve been through, the risk isn’t worth it. My surgeon told me I probably won’t ever get my hand back 100 percent.”

Contact K.T. McKee at kate.McKee@frontiersman.com or 352-2252.