NPR

Did An IV Cocktail Of Vitamins And Drugs Save This Lumberjack From Sepsis?

A 51-year-old man nearly died from septic shock, when a crushing injury led to overwhelming infection. After getting an experimental treatment, he's recovering well, but some doctors want more proof.
Kristopher Kelly near his home in Concrete, Wash., in February. He broke his pelvis and all his ribs in a work accident last year. The resulting infection he developed in the hospital almost killed him.

This story of a man who nearly died in the hospital actually started in the woods of Washington's Cascade Mountains last summer.

"I was cutting for a logging outfit up on these rock cliffs and I felled a 150-foot fir tree into [some] maple trees," says Kristopher Kelly, a 51-year-old lumberjack. The maples "had a bunch of dead tops — they call 'em widow makers," Kelly says. "You don't want to get under them because they'll make you a widow."

And when the top of the fir tree crashed into those maples, he says, the

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