Don't Feel Sorry For Me

Shan lost half her body to a sudden infection but she’s managed to take positives from her ordeal.

- Pieter Van Zyl

ALMOST overnight her life changed forever. A sepsis infection came out of nowhere, forcing surgeons to slice away at her face and body in a bid to halt the bacteria raging through her body and devouring her from the inside out.

Thirteen operations and 25 procedures later and Shaninlea Visser is very different to the woman she once was.

Wheelchair-bound and disfigured, she’s suffered devastating trauma and has to relearn to do everything.

You’d expect her to fall apart after such an experience – but not Shan. “I don’t want people to think, ‘Ag shame, poor woman’,” the mom of one says.

And within moments of meeting her, pity is the last thing you feel – instead the overwhelming impression is of a brave woman full of hope, speaking candidly about her terrifying brush with death.

Her ordeal has even had a positive outcome, she says: her once-crumbling marriage is on the mend.

She’s dyed her hair because “a little colour adds light to life,” she says as sunlight fills her room at the rehabilitation unit of Nurture Aurora Hospital in Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape. She’s been here since 23 March, working to piece what’s left of her body back together.

THIS year got off to a bad start for Shan (34). She and her husband, Anthony (43), had separated and divorce was on the cards. She moved to PE from Durban on 5 January to open a new office for the transport logistics company she worked for.

Less than two weeks later she suddenly felt ill and lost consciousness in the bathroom. By the next morning she couldn’t get out of bed. At about 2.30 pm she got up for a drink of water but passed out again.

A colleague who’d come by to see how she was rushed her to hospital.