‘I HAD TO STAY POSITIVE'

She lost all her limbs and half her face after a mongoose attacked her – but this KZN mom has mastered the art of looking on the bright side

- JACQUES MYBURGH

SHE knew something was wrong as soon as she got to work that day – she felt feverish and nauseous and when she went to the bathroom to freshen up, she fainted. Confused and scared, Shaninlea Visser asked her boss to drive her to the hospital.

“My hands and feet were on fire – it was the worst pain I’ve ever experienced,” Shaninlea tells us from her home in Sezela, south of Durban. “My kidneys started to fail and my arms and legs were pitch black; my nose and lips too.”

The diagnosis was shocking: Shan, as everyone calls her, had contracted septicaemia (an infection in the blood) after a friend’s pet mongoose bit her on the hand.

“I thought nothing of the bite,” she says. “I cleaned the wound and that was it.”

As with a dog bite, a tetanus injection was needed to prevent infection – but Shan didn’t believe the bite was serious enough to warrant one.

Two days later the sepsis ripped through her body with devastating speed, shutting down her organs and halting the blood supply to her arms, legs and parts of her face.

In a bid to save her life, doctors amputated first her limbs and then her nose, lips and the tip of her tongue.

She was put into a two-week coma and when she came round, she had to confront her ravaged features in the mirror.

“I insisted on seeing my face almost immediately – it was appalling,” she recalls. But she knew she had to stay strong for her daughter, Kiaralea (15).

‘I’VE LEARNT TO GET BY WITH WHAT I HAVE – WITH WILLPOWER YOU CAN OVERCOME ANYTHING’

“I took each day as it came. I just had to get myself used to it.”