Boardman boy wins battle against super bug

It was nearly nine months before Andy was clear of the infection and out from under a doctor’s care.

By WILLIAM K. ALCORN

VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER

BOARDMAN — Andy Zack was a typical, healthy and active boy who played organized soccer and basketball and enjoyed riding his mountain bike.

But last August, a metatarsal bone in his foot was broken in a crash on his bike. About a week later, he suffered a bruised hip when he hit the brakes on his bike and slid forward into the bike’s top tube.

Less than a week later, the 11-year-old was literally fighting for his life against a virulent staph infection that was eating holes in his lungs.

A so-called super bug, CA-MRSA, community-associated methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureas, had invaded Andy’s body just weeks after he had moved to Boardman from Fort Collins, Colo.

It would be nearly nine months — March of this year — before Andy was clear of the infection and out from under a doctor’s care.

“I thought I was going to lose Andrew to this infection,” said his father, John Zack, a Boardman native.

Andy, now 12 and in the seventh grade at Boardman Glenwood Middle School, is featured in the August 2007 edition of Reader’s Digest in an article titled “Deadly Super Bugs,” along with two other young people afflicted with CA-MRSA. One, a 16-year-old football player from Georgia, survived to became his old self. The other, a 2-month girl, did not live.

About the super bug

Doctors say CA-MRSA differs from the MRSA that is associated with hospitals and nursing homes, where the sick and elderly are particularly susceptible to the infection. CA-MRSA attacks healthy people who have not necessarily been in a hospital, and can reoccur and jump from one member of a family to another.

“Children with the flu are particularly vulnerable because their resistance is down and they can’t fight off the bacteria, which can sometimes lead to fatal pneumonia,” Dr. Blaise Congeni says in the magazine. Dr. Congeni, director of infectious diseases at Akron Children’s Hospital, was Andy’s physician during his bout with CA-MRSA.

Andy’s problems began just a couple of days after he bruised his hip on a Friday. By Sunday, he was feverish and had trouble walking because of the hip pain. By Tuesday, his temperature was spiking to 104 and could not be controlled with Tylenol and Motrin.

His sister took him to the emergency room at St. Elizabeth Health Center Boardman, where medical personnel concluded he had a deep muscle bruise. When a urine test found nothing out of the ordinary, Andy was sent home.

“We doctored him for a couple of days, but on Wednesday or Thursday, when he was not any better, I made an appointment with our family doctor,” John said.

Making the diagnosis

The doctor took one look and said: “Your son is really sick,” and sent him immediately back to St. Elizabeth Health Center in Youngstown, John said. That’s when the blood work and probing and antibiotics started, and by Saturday or Sunday the CA-MRSA diagnosis was made.

“Andrew was out of it because of fever and pain,” his father said. Once the diagnosis was made, doctors at St. Elizabeth decided more expertise was needed and transferred him by ambulance to Akron Children’s Hospital.

“It turned out to be a great decision,” John said.

He was in the hospital for three weeks before he was well enough to come home, and it was October before Andy began classes in the sixth grade.

During those frantic three weeks, Andy had two surgeries: One on his hip to remove the infection; and another to drain fluid from his chest cavity and lungs.

Andy said he was being injected with so many things that he didn’t know how bad he was during his hospital stay.

“Seeing you worry didn’t help,” Andy said to his father.

“I had good reason to worry,” his dad replied.

“I’m 50 years old, and Andy had more shots in that three-week period than I’ve had in my entire life. He endured industrial-strength antibiotics and underwent medical procedures I’ve never even heard of,” John said. “I didn’t know for two weeks if Andrew was going to live or die.

“He drank sports drinks until he was sick of them to combat the dehydration caused by the fever. I think two hours at a stretch was the longest he ever slept while he was in the hospital, because they were continually waking him to monitor him and give him medication. It was enough to try the strongest person, but he never complained,” his father said.

Possible source

John, a software engineer, had his own demons to battle while he sat by Andy’s hospital bed. Although doctors never pinpointed the cause of Andy’s infection, they said John’s episodes with boils, while he was never tested for CA-MRSA, were a possible source.

Before he goes back to school in a few weeks, he and his father and brother, John, 16, a student at Boardman High School, and sister, Laina, 19, a student at Youngstown State University, are planning a trip back to Fort Collins, where two other siblings, Kara Logan and Diana Zack, still live.

For John, moving to Boardman was literally coming back home. In fact, he is living in the house that he grew up in on Southern Boulevard with his parents, John C. and Olga Zack, both of whom are deceased.

John graduated from Boardman High School in 1975, and studied at Youngstown State University for two years before transferring to West Virginia University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1979. He earned a master’s degree from Virginia Tech in 1983 and then moved to Colorado, where he met his wife, Toni, who died in 2001.

Back to area

He moved back last summer be near to his girlfriend, Rosella Baker of Columbiana, with whom he became acquainted while she was his mother’s caregiver.

John worked as a contract engineer for Progressive Auto Insurance when he first came back to Boardman, but quit to take care of Andy with the help of Rosella and Liana.

“My boss was nice enough to ask me back when Andy was better,” said John, who now works for Sirva Relocation in Cleveland.

“I think I’m back,” said Andy, who lifts weights three times a week and runs three days a week as part of his therapy. “I get one day off,” he said.

He is a member of the Boardman Glenwood chorus and is “thinking about going out for wrestling.”

Andy plans to become a doctor, but said that desire was not triggered by his illness. A hint to his future career plans might be his favorite television shows: “Scrubs” and “House, M.D.”

alcorn@vindy.com