A Nigerian man has been forced to undergo a leg amputation after a home pedicure procedure went terribly wrong.
Olubiyi Jibowu, a 57-year-old man, ran a bath, added Himalayan salt, and soaked his feet—unaware of how hot the water was. It wasn’t until he pulled his feet out that he noticed severe blisters had formed across them.
Instead of seeing a doctor, he treated the burns himself with Dettol, hoping they would heal fast. But the skin kept peeling off, and the wound refused to close up.
It eventually turned black, leaving him in serious pain.
“I initially thought, these are just blisters, they’ve peeled and they’re a bit sore”, Olubiyi said. “I didn’t want them to get infected, so I thought Dettol would make it better. That’s what my mum used to do. She would put a drop here and there, but I kept pouring it on.
“It was pain I can’t even describe. I’m a big guy, but it was just too much. The skin eventually shrivelled up and was just torn apart. It went all black. I could see the fragments of my bone structure on my feet.”
Olubiyi, who lives in London, didn’t realise how damaged his feet were as his type 2 diabetes made it harder to feel pain.
But the dad didn’t even know he had diabetes until he eventually went to the hospital. Until then, he continued walking three miles to work every day, totally unaware that the injury was turning into deadly sepsis.
By the time the addiction support worker showed his foot to his boss, the infection had already set in. The dad-of-one said: “The left foot just wasn’t healing. I went to work one day and showed my manager, and she sent me home immediately. I called my sister, and I was in severe pain; she could hear it in my voice that I needed urgent help. My skin was falling off.
“I went to King’s Hospital in London, and I just thought, this will pass, it will get better – and it didn’t. I was in the hospital a bit longer than I thought I would be, and it was just me being wheeled around in a wheelchair. The moment I got there, I knew it was serious. It was rapidly deteriorating.
“They wrapped it up and pumped me full of antibiotics, but there was no healing.”
