Spear recalls brush with death in Cuba Now recovering, state official caught ‘superbug’ infection on trade mission

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NOBLEBORO – Inside a tidy ranch home high on a ridge, Maine Agriculture Commissioner Robert Spear sits on a blue sofa, his right arm swathed in bandages and resting high on a pillow. He’s looking out a picture window into his vegetable fields across the street. Pounded by rain, some of the fields are full of puddles while others are tented in plastic.

“That’s where I’d be if this hadn’t happened,” he lamented Saturday, referring to his arm. “I’d be helping with the planting. It is so frustrating staying down.”

Spear is recovering from a near-death bout with septic shock, which began as an innocent bump to the elbow in a shower while on a Maine trade mission to Cuba last month. Within hours, Spear had collapsed on his hotel room floor and was in a Cuban hospital in critical condition.

Talking publicly of his ordeal for the first time, Spear appears weak and pale. He has lost 15 pounds on an already slender frame. He recognizes that he has a long way to go to full recovery and acknowledges how close to death he came.

“It got to the point that I would close my eyes and see visions, things I had never seen before,” he said. “I saw vapors in the room.”

Spear said his experience in Cuba began on April 1, when he and a contingent from Maine flew out of Montreal for Cuba to secure agriculture and forestry contracts.

While staying at a hotel in Havana, Spear had a nurse check a slow-healing wound on his hand and she continued to check on his progress. Although the hand wound apparently was not connected to his illness, it was that nurse’s diligence that saved his life.

Spear recalled how he was preparing to attend a major dinner on April 4.

“I went in the shower and in trying to keep my hand from getting wet, I hit my elbow on the shower wall,” he said. “By the time I got out of the shower, my arm was swelling up.”

Spear did not realize that he had nicked the skin on his elbow, allowing the deadly bacteria, staph haemolyticus, to enter his body. One of dozens of varieties of staph bacteria, haemolyticus has been called a “super bug” because of its resistance to standard antibiotic therapy.

Staph infections can be as mild as to cause sore throats and as deadly as the infamous “flesh-eating bacteria.” Spear’s variety is among the most dangerous and least responsive to medication.

After his shower, Spear attended the dinner.

“It was a long, drawn-out affair with about eight courses,” he said. Halfway through the meal, Spear felt quite ill and was having chills. “I really thought it was the food.”

He returned after dinner to his hotel room. By then, he was shaking. “I didn’t tell anyone because I still believed I had eaten something that disagreed with me,” he said. “I never connected it with my swelling arm.”

Spear shook all night. He became violently ill in the morning, later felt a bit better but was incredibly weak. He told other trade mission members to proceed without him while he spent the day in bed.

In the afternoon, when Spear tried to open the door for the nurse who had been checking his hand wound, he collapsed. Regaining he senses, he realized he was so weak he couldn’t lift his arms. Fellow travelers carried him to a taxi and he was rushed, semiconscious, to a nearby hospital.

It was discovered that the bacteria in his arm were giving off “super toxins,” he said. “I started going downhill fast.” His blood pressure plummeted to 50/37 (normal is 120/80.) His vascular system starting shutting down and his kidneys were failing.

Back in Maine, Janet Spear was notified that her husband was near death. She got the call at the family’s Nobleboro home, where her two sons happened to be that day. “We were told to get to Cuba immediately,” she said.

Her first call was to Gov. John Baldacci. He got the ball rolling with U.S. officials in Guantanamo Bay who were preparing to airlift Spear to U.S. soil.

Spear, who was in and out of consciousness, said his medical attention and airlift are pretty much a blur. But he reports he was well cared for.

“They have the highest education there but not the latest equipment,” he noted. “Things were pretty basic. I can’t say enough about my care, however. The Cubans saved my life. There is no doubt about that.”

Spear said it was his impression that he got better care because he was an American official. Pedro Alvarez, the top Cuban agricultural official, stayed by Spear’s side the entire time he was hospitalized.

On April 8, after five days in Cuban hospitals, Spear was flown in a Learjet operated by a St. Petersburg, Fla.-based private aviation firm to Jackson Memorial Hospital at the University of Miami.

Greeting her husband upon his arrival, Janet Spear was shocked by what she saw.

“His eyes were yellow. His body was so swollen, huge with fluid,” she described. “His arm was three times the size of his regular arm. It looked like a monster’s arm.”

“I couldn’t even be happy that I was back on U.S. soil,” the commissioner said. “I was so sick that just getting help was all I was interested in. I was so weak that I couldn’t even communicate.”

Janet Spear said the pockets of infection were so severe that her spouse’s arm was tomato red. “It was like the infection was eating him,” she said, adding the hospital staff informed her that it was the worst case of cellulitis (inflammation of the connective tissue) they had ever seen.

She and the couple’s two sons, Terry and Jeff, were prepared for the worst.

“It never crossed my mind that I would die,” Spear said, looking back on the crisis from the comfort of his living room.

In an attempt to halt the infection’s spread, a Miami team operated on Spear’s arm. He continued to receive massive doses of antibiotic cocktails and was surrounded by five or six doctors continually.

Spear was stabilized and returned to his Nobleboro farm a week later, only to be re-hospitalized at Miles Memorial Hospital in Damariscotta when the infection flared again.

Now, at home, Spear is still extremely weak. A few phone calls tucker him out. “I’ve never been sick before,” he said. “That’s why I’m discouraged.”

He said it will be weeks before he can go back to work even part time, and it could easily be months before he is strong enough for a full day’s work.

Spear did clear a hurdle Saturday, ending a daily regimen of two massive doses of antibiotics. He hopes his condition will remain stable over the next few days – a sign he is finally on the road to recovery.

In character, reflecting back on his harrowing experience and the Maine trade mission, Spear said: “It was all worth it, though. We got some wonderful contracts.”

His wife just shook her head.