“I’m grateful for life,” Dylan Riley says of his strep infection. “Things could have been very different; my family could have been planning a funeral.”

Last October, Dylan Riley was playing frisbee golf with friends on a sunny afternoon in Oklahoma City. The puck fell on the road and when he went to pick it up, he tripped and cut his right knee.

“I’m a klutz,” says Riley, 31, who works in construction and welding and hopes to join the military.

His mother, Trina White, an infectious diseases nurse, examined the cut and thought it looked good. There was no infection.

But almost two weeks later, Riley woke up feeling like she had the flu. He was sweaty, had a fever, also had body aches, and couldn’t stop vomiting. She took a hot bath, thinking it would make her feel better. He couldn’t move after getting out of the tub. She screamed for her roommate, who called an ambulance.

He remembers paramedics talking to him and asking him questions, but then he lost consciousness.

“Everything went dark,” Riley says.

He was diagnosed at Baptist Integris Hospital streptococcal toxic shock syndrome – a rare but very serious, life-threatening infection.

“He came to our hospital seriously ill, almost on the verge of death,” says his doctor. Dr. Bob SchoapsMedical Director of Special Intensive Care and Acute Mechanical Circulatory Support Integris Health Anonymous.

Schoaps explains this streptococcusThe bacteria that caused the sore throat had somehow found its way into Riley’s body. blood circulation.

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Riley’s organs began to shut down and her heart stopped beating. Twice doctors had to resuscitate him.

“If Dylan had been stuck in his house for a few more hours, he probably wouldn’t have gotten out of this,” Schoaps says. “When we see patients with levels of disease like his, we estimate their chances of survival will be 10% or less.”

When Riley’s mother White arrived at the hospital, she remembers the staff asking if she wanted her son to be on life support.

“As a mother, this is your worst nightmare,” she says. “Do what you have to do and save my son,” I said.

Riley was placed on a veno-arterial ECMO machine to support both heart and lung function. The machine kept him alive but did not deliver oxygenated blood to his extremities.

His limbs, even the tips of his ears, began to turn black because the tissue was dying without blood circulation. He was also undergoing dialysis for his kidneys.

While Riley was unconscious, doctors told his family he might need amputation.

Riley says he doesn’t remember anything about the first five days in the hospital. However, he regained consciousness when the ECMO machine was removed.

“The first thing I remember was seeing my mother and then my father,” he says.

Seeing her divorced parents together, Riley knew something was very wrong. “They don’t want to share a room very often,” he says. “And I was like, ‘Okay, what happened?’ I thought.

His family and medical team told him his body had gone into toxic shock and he nearly died. From the moment he regained consciousness, his mother began to prepare him for the possibility of amputation.

He explained to Riley that the machine had saved his life and that he was very grateful, but that the tissue loss in his limbs was so severe that he might have to lose a limb.

“I told him that no matter what happens, we still love him and nothing is going to change anything.”

White feared he made the wrong decision by agreeing to put himself on a life support machine because he knew it could still result in amputation. “I was selfish. I wanted my son. I didn’t care what he looked like. I didn’t care what parts of him we lost,” she says. “I was worried that he would use this against me. I was worried that he would be upset because he was living a life so different from the one he knew.”

But after a few weeks, their fears calmed. “Riley said to me, ‘Mom, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that I’m still here,'” she recalls.

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Meanwhile, he was dealing with many strange side effects. “Every part of my body was stripped like a snake,” he says. Even his tongue had been stripped of his taste buds; He didn’t want to eat because the food didn’t taste good anymore.

It took surgeons several months to determine how much of his limbs they could save.

But Dylan’s sense of humor has always been one of his greatest assets. So when the doctors told him his legs would have to be amputated, he joked instead of getting upset.

“I always try to see the positive side of things,” he says. His friends and family were crying, but he refused. “When I saw them crying, I said, ‘Don’t do it, because you’ll make me cry.’ My first instinct is always to make them laugh, so I just sat there making jokes about amputations.”

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legs amputated The week before Christmas 2023. He asked his mother to take a photo of his bandaged legs. “You could see they were cut,” he says. He placed a photo of his own amputation next to the Gingerbread Man in Shrek, whose legs were amputated. “I always had a really dark sense of humor,” he says.

Part of his hands were amputated in January.

He could hold his palm in his right hand. Surgeons were able to save part of his thumb and part of his index finger and middle finger on his left hand. And thankfully, she says, parts of her hand have rejuvenated. “I can still pick up a pen and I can still write,” he says. “But I can’t hold power tools like I used to.”

He was fitted with a prosthetic leg on Friday, May 17, 2024. Limbs for Life. He started rehab on Monday, learning to deal with steps and curbs. “I was sweating,” he says. “I wanted to come back sooner. I didn’t want to be one of those people who said, ‘Oh, I feel sorry for me.’ I wanted to prove people wrong.”

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A year later, Riley is determined to get her life back. He’s getting back to some of his favorite hobbies, like league bowling. “It’s not nice,” he says, laughing. He also returned to playing disc golf with his friends.

Schoaps says Riley’s “persistent optimism” is one of the main reasons he’s done so well. Riley visits other amputees in the hospital before they lose their limbs to give them hope.

“I can at least help them understand that this isn’t the end of everything, this is just the beginning of their new story,” he says. “You can go in one of two directions: You can move forward and succeed, or you can sit there and linger and step back.”

He also plans to give motivational speeches to local school children to teach them the importance of persevering through adversity and never giving up, no matter the difficulties.

“I’m grateful for life,” he says. “Things could be very different. My family could be planning a funeral.”