A woman was left fighting for her life after a tick bite caused her organs to shut down.
Cathrine Abbott-Coetzee could never have predicted the direction her life would take after she woke up one morning with a bite on her arm – which she assumed was from a relatively harmless mosquito.
But within two days, her health deteriorated and, after fainting, she was rushed to hospital.
The small bite caused terrifying complications, as Cathrine’s organs began to fail, causing dry gangrene – a condition where tissue becomes dry and shrinks due to lack of blood flow and parts of the body turn black or a shade of blue or purple.
The side effect meant most of her fingers and toes were reduced to “short black stumps” – and four months after the bite, Cathrine had nine toes and seven fingers amputated.
While she survived the scare and was given prosthetics for her fingers and shoe inserts for her toes, life had changed forever – with Cathrine’s mental health declining and her marriage breaking down as a result.
But now, having finally come to terms with what happened to her, Cathrine has been able to find love – and happiness – once more, and embrace her differences.
“I can’t wish my life back,” Cathrine, now 60, told Need To Know.
“I just want to be the happy person I used to be.
“One of the biggest breakthroughs I made was realising my fingers had been part of my life for five decades but I wasn’t dependent on them.
“They did not define me as a person.”
Cathrine, who lives in Christiana in the North West province of South Africa, has had more than a decade to adjust to her new life following the bite in December 2013.
As well as her health battle, she also faced personal issues, with her marriage breaking down – partly due to the stress of the incident – and Cathrine said she “often wished she hadn’t survived”.
But life has turned around recently for the brave woman.
Within the past two years, she reconnected with an old friend from her school days, Prieur du Plessis, 63.
But in 2022, the pair reconnected for the first time in 45 years – and quickly formed a strong bond.
Cathrine said: “We sat and chatted about the old days and what had happened to whom and the conversation just wouldn’t stop.”
Her missing fingers weren’t an issue, though Prieur sensed that she was still in “mental anguish” about all that she had been through.
Cathrine added: “My laughter was also taken from me when I lost my fingers and toes.
“Prieur gave me my laughter back.
“We laugh so much.”
He proposed in mid-2023.
Cathrine said: “I thought, here I come, half a person – not just physically but also emotionally.
“And he’s willing to take me just as I am.
“That says a lot.”
Cathrine has also spent time in therapy, working on herself, and says it helped bring her to her now-fiancé.
She said: “During the sessions, the psychologist told me to go to an imaginary place where I feel safe.
“For me, that place was a waterfall.
“I had to take an imaginary stone and scrape off a little bit of the sadness clinging to me every day.
“Then I had to throw those bits of pain into the water one by one to be washed away.
“But it takes a while.
“It was a damn long road.
“However, it brought me here, to Prieur’s house.
“Now that I have someone in my life again, I treasure what I have and what we have together.”
While her stumps are still sensitive if stubbed, Cathrine has otherwise been able to fully adjust to life with her new hands and feet.
And she happily flashes the ring Prieur, a retired electrician, made for her from a piece of copper.
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