Flesh-eating bacteria left Cambridgeshire mother in two-week coma

Caroline Fonjock says she would be dead were it not for the quick actions of NHS medics. Feeling under the weather, the 45-year-old social worker noticed what she believed was a boil in her upper groin. She initially thought she had a routine urinary infection, but within 36 hours she was in and out of consciousness and vomiting what she describes as "black tar". Doctors later told Caroline, who lives near Haverhill, Suffolk, that the "boil" was in fact necrotising fasciitis – a rare infection that destroys tissue beneath the skin. She needed emergency surgery to survive. Five years on, her case is helping researchers in Cambridge improve how the condition is identified and treated. Caroline has type 2 diabetes and a history of infections but says the speed of this one was "just phenomenal". "I've had illnesses before but with all of them I felt in control," she says. In April 2021, during the Covid pandemic, her condition rapidly worsened. What she initially thought was a small boil began to "track" up her leg, feeling like a "hardened tube". At Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge, a consultant told her she needed immediate surgery and multiple skin grafts and could need to spend up