Alberta man determined to 'get walking again' after mysterious infection claims both legs

It started out like a normal summer weekend.

Francois Trudeau mowed his lawn. He enjoyed a couple of beers and some leftover pizza. He daydreamed about where he might take his boys fishing the next day. And then he went to bed.

He awoke the next morning, July 14, feeling anything but normal. With intense chills and nausea, he thought he might have a severe flu. But there was also another, unusual symptom — excruciating pain in his right knee.

Eleven days later, both legs had been amputated.

And he still doesn't know what caused it all.

"Nobody could give me an answer," said Trudeau, who lives just south of Red Deer in Penhold, Alta., with his wife and two sons.

Doctors have told him that he had some kind of skin infection that originated in his right leg, although they're not sure how he got it or why it progressed so quickly.

"They know what it's not, basically," he said. "It's not flesh-eating disease. It's not an auto-immune disease. It's not diabetes. I got tested and cleared of all those things."

'The hardest thing'

The mystery infection was serious. His body went into septic shock. As he lost blood flow to his extremities, his feet turned black and his legs blistered.

Doctors tried to save his lower limbs but ultimately had no choice but to amputate.

Trudeau's wife, Susanna Shott, is thankful he survived but says it's still difficult not understanding how her husband fell so ill, so suddenly.

"I think that was the hardest thing," she said. "Because it was really frustrating to just sit there every day, wondering why it happened and then wondering if, down the road, it could happen again."

While he's still in the early stages of recovery, Trudeau is already thinking about prosthetic legs.

"You've got to keep moving forward, right? I can't dwell on the past. I've got two boys, so my mission now is to heal up and get walking again."

He had recently started a new job but didn't yet qualify for extended health benefits. His wife said there is some funding available through a provincial program for prosthetics, but the family is also raising money through a crowdfunding campaign for specialized transportation and home renovations to accommodate their new reality.

Trudeau is thankful doctors were able to do the amputations below the knee in both cases, although it will be some time before he can even begin working with artificial limbs.

"The timeline just to start working with a prosthetic is three months — and that's on a good stump, if you will," he said.

"So my other side [the right leg, where the infection started] will probably be even longer because it may require, as the surgeon put it, some tweaking with skin grafts. But we won't know until it's healed up."

In the meantime, he said, he's determined to stay motivated in his recovery — and to not give up.

"For the sake of my boys," he said, fighting back tears. "I can't."