Mud Run Leaves Woman Blind in Eye, With $100K Bill

A young mother in Texas who holds down two jobs but doesn't have health insurance is in the fight of her life—doing battle with not just the necrotizing fasciitis that has already claimed the vision in her left eye but also with her $100,000 medical bill. It all started a few hours after a mud run in Dallas earlier this month. "My eye started hurting, like maybe I've got mud or some debris in there," Brittany Williams tells CBS DFW. "When I opened my eye, it was just like white. The whole room was white.... [The bacteria] just completely melted off of my eye." She suspects that debris cut her eye, providing an entryway for the bacteria; CBS reports it has destroyed her cornea.

And while some doctors have told her it's possible she'll someday regain vision in that eye with surgery, she needs antibiotics to prevent the bacteria from spreading to other parts of her body and several doctors are denying her treatment because she has no insurance. (Her GoFundMe page is currently at around $11,500. An updated posted there on Tuesday notes "we were asked to leave [an appointment] and told we could no longer be treated within their facility secondary to lack of insurance and full payment.") Williams' ordeal isn't exactly rare, reports the New York Daily News. Just last week, dozens of mud runners in France became violently ill from gastroenteritis, likely due to bacteria in the mud, while 22 people contracted a diarrheal illness in Nevada in 2012 thanks to bacteria in animal feces on an obstacle course. (In Florida, a "flesh-eating" water bacteria has killed two.)