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Happy Days for 'Lucky' Cu Prof; Laureate Who Lost Shoulder, Arm Talks of Near-Death, Life

Posted on: Wednesday, 13 April 2005, 09:00 CDT

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Eric Cornell slipped into unconsciousness while watching his beloved Red Sox win the World Series, and he woke from a coma three weeks later without a left arm and shoulder.

Cornell, 43, underwent at least eight surgeries last fall to halt the lightning spread of the strep bacteria devouring his body.

Upbeat and playful at a Tuesday morning news conference, he recounted his brush with death to reporters for the first time. His wife, Celeste Landry, was by his side.

"People will come up to me and say, 'Oh, you've been through so much. What a horrible catastrophe. I'm so sorry.'

"And I say, I won the lottery, you know? Most people in my situation would have died," he said. "I got a lucky break, and I plan to take advantage of it."

Cornell said the loss of his arm and shoulder is an inconvenience, not a catastrophe.

"It just turns out to be not that big a deal," he said.

"I have returned already to a very full life with my family, and when my skin grafts are fully healed, I expect things will be more or less back to normal."

Over the course of a week in late October, Cornell's quiet academic life - a mix of research, teaching, scientific conferences and time with his wife and two young daughters - was violently transformed.

The first sign that something was amiss came on Oct. 24, when Cornell felt feverish and out of sorts. He shrugged it off as the flu.

But the next day, he developed an aching pain in his left shoulder. The pain steadily worsened, and on Oct. 27 he was sent to the emergency room at Boulder Community Hospital.

"I'd had sports injuries before, and this didn't feel like that," Cornell said in an interview following the morning news conference. "This seemed like a whole 'nother thing.

"I guess I sort of assumed that I had somehow hurt my shoulder in some way that I didn't really understand and that they would figure it out, give me some cortisone, give me some painkiller, and send me home."

Infection pushed him 'very near death'

The doctors were puzzled at first. Then someone suggested it might be necrotizing fasciitis, a rare disease usually caused by Group A streptococcus bacteria. Toxins released by the germs quickly destroy skin, muscle and fat tissue.

Necrotizing fasciitis is commonly called flesh-eating disease.

"They did many, many tests, and then the idea of necrotizing fasciitis came up and they cut into the skin to see if that was it," Landry said. "That was the first surgery."

Before that exploratory operation, Cornell was lying in an emergency room bed watching the fourth and final game of the 2004 World Series between the Red Sox and the St. Louis Cardinals. He managed to remain conscious until the game ended. Then the sedatives knocked him out.

"I wasn't particularly worried," he recalled Tuesday. "I was actually more concerned about the baseball game. . . . But then the lights went out. So, that's the last thing I remember for three weeks."

Hours after the first surgery confirmed necrotizing fasciitis, a second operation was performed to cut away infected flesh, including Cornell's left arm and shoulder.

"Even so, the infection continued to spread, and I was very near death," he said in a statement he read to reporters Tuesday. He spoke in calm, measured tones, the empty left sleeve of his blue short-sleeved shirt hanging limply.

On the afternoon of Oct. 28, Cornell was airlifted to the Burn Intensive Care Unit at the University of Colorado Hospital in Denver. Two more operations removed more skin, muscle and fat from large areas of his left torso.

"After the fourth surgery, the surgeon came out and said that he thought they had got it all," Landry said. "And that's when I started to have hope."

Additional surgeries were done to cover the wounds with skin grafts. Cornell was kept in a medically induced coma for three weeks to allow his body to recover a bit.

In late November, he awoke to find himself lying in an intensive care unit bed, breathing through a tracheotomy tube.

"When I first woke up, I didn't really appreciate it was missing," he said.

"There's a medical phenomenon known as phantom limb, where you feel that you still have an amputated limb, even when you don't," he said. "For the first few hours, I assumed it was somewhere underneath all of those bandages.

"But it wasn't," he said with a laugh.

Optimism aids recovery

Cornell said support from family and friends, as well as his naturally optimistic disposition, have helped him through the slow recovery process. But the first week after he awoke, when the realization of what he'd lost hit home, was an ordeal.

"It wasn't just the arm and shoulder," he said in the interview. "I had lost a lot of muscle, a lot of flesh. I wasn't strong enough even to breathe on my own. I thought maybe I was dying."

But he gradually regained strength and in mid-December went home to his wife and two daughters, Eliza, 8, and Sophia, 6.

Necrotizing fasciitis can be caused when cuts, sores or other breaks in the skin allow strep bacteria to invade the body. But in Cornell's case, doctors couldn't determine how he acquired it, he said.

"It just wasn't my lucky day, I guess," he said. "What almost certainly happened is I must have had a little scratch or a cut there, and then had that scratch or cut exposed to the invasive form of the strep bacteria.

"But the original scratch or cut was never found," he said.

Cornell has been undergoing rehabilitation and physical therapy since then. And he recently returned part time to his Boulder labs.

Cornell is a research physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an adjoint professor of physics at the University of Colorado, and a fellow at JILA, a joint CU-NIST research institute.

"We're glad to have him back," said CU physicist and JILA fellow John Bohn.

"It's hard for me to even imagine being in a situation like that, you know?" Bohn said Tuesday. "He's always been tremendously upbeat, but it's pretty remarkable that he's still Cheerful Eric after all that."

In 2001, Cornell, CU physicist Carl Wieman and MIT researcher Wolfgang Ketterle shared the Nobel Prize in physics. Cornell and Wieman won for being the first to create an exotic form of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate.

"His illness was profoundly upsetting to me personally," Wieman said in a statement issued Tuesday.

An opportunity to hustle pool

"I was there in the hospital during the worst period and knew just how gravely ill he was, so it was an enormous relief to see how he has recovered and how well he and his family have handled it."

Cornell said he plans to be fitted with a prosthetic arm. Naturally right-handed and an avid pool player, Cornell said he may buy an attachment that will allow him to cradle the tip of a pool cue in his artificial left hand.

"I'll go to the bar, the bets will go down, then I put on the arm," he joked as the Coors Events Center conference room erupted in laughter. "I could really supplement my income that way."

A former runner and cyclist, he's also looking into recumbent bicycles. The family car has been altered so Cornell can drive it, and he is scheduled for a motor vehicle test today.

He'll gradually increase the amount of time he spends at work but does not plan to teach again until next spring. In the lab, Cornell is delving into experiments to determine if electrons are symmetrical.

"I mean, all of us aren't symmetrical," he said. "I look at myself in the mirror, and I seem to be missing a right arm."

INFOBOX 1

Necrotizing fasciitis

* Usual source: Group A streptococcus bacteria, which are common in the throat and on the skin. Most Group A strep infections cause relatively mild illnesses, such as strep throat and impetigo. On rare occasions, severe or life-threatening disease can occur when the bacteria get into the blood, muscle or lungs. The bacteria then reproduce and release toxins that kill tissue.

600 Approximate number cases of necrotizing fasciitis reported in the United States in 1999, the last year for which numbers are available at the CDC.

20% Mortality rate (patients who die from the disease)

Source: Centers For Disease Control And Prevention

INFOBOX 2

Necrotizing fasciitis

* Usual source: Group A streptococcus bacteria, which are common in the throat and on the skin. Most Group A strep infections cause relatively mild illnesses, such as strep throat and impetigo. On rare occasions, severe or life-threatening disease can occur when the bacteria get into the blood, muscle or lungs. The bacteria then reproduce and release toxins that kill tissue.

600 Approximate number cases of necrotizing fasciitis reported in the United States in 1999, the last year for which numbers are available at the CDC.

20% Mortality rate (patients who die from the disease)

Source: Centers For Disease Control And Prevention

Source: Rocky Mountain News

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