What started as a routine hunting trip in Colorado turned into a nightmare for 40-year-old Max Armstrong. While cooking a pasta dinner during a December 2024 expedition, Armstrong burned his thumb on his skillet. “I grabbed a skillet wrong and my thumb touched the hot part, I could feel it burning as I moved it to the table but I didn’t want to drop it,” Armstrong recalled. Being an outdoor man, Armstrong didn’t think much of the injury, treating it as he would any other small wound. “I didn’t think much of it as I have gotten burns, scrapes, and cuts from living in the outdoors and being outdoors my whole life. After dinner, I cleaned up the burn, put a bandage on it, and left it,” he explained.
The Silent Spread of Infection
Two days after burning himself, Max noticed his left leg start to swell. He thought he had somehow missed an ankle injury of some kind, and remained unconcerned. But the situation quickly got worse as Max’s toenails began turning purple and the swelling in his leg increased dramatically. Worse, the burn on his thumb had started to look truly awful. “At this point, the burn on my thumb had become pretty ugly, it had turned black and looked like it was eating away at my thumb,” Armstrong described. After a couple of days, a friend suggested that Max should seek medical attention.
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Race Against Time
Arriving at AdventHealth Parker in Colorado, Armstrong’s condition declined quickly. “The doctors were asking me lots of questions, but my eyes started rolling back in my head and I started talking nonsense,” he recounted on NY Post. Doctors were quick to diagnosed him – Max had sepsis caused by a strep A bacterial infection. The culprit? The burn wound. Armstrong was immediately placed into a medically induced coma and moved to AdventHealth Porter in Denver, where doctors were upfront and warned his family to be prepared for the worst. “Doctors told them that I might not make it, there was a lot of concern that I would never wake up,” Armstrong said according to NDTV.
A Life-Altering Recovery
After six days in a coma, Max woke up. The sepsis had completely ravaged his body, particularly his feet, which had turned completely black. Although initially resisting any suggestions to amputate, the pain during physical therapy convinced Max that it was necessary. So, following a three-hour operation on December 23, 2024, both of Armstrong’s legs were amputated below the knees. At the end of January, 2025, after extensive rehabilitation at Sky Ridge Sports Medicine and Rehabilitation, Max returned home to start adapting to a new chapter of his life in a wheelchair. Despite a rough set of circumstances, Max has been able to keep seeing life with his glass half-full. “I’ve seen the entirety of this process as a spiritual journey. It was not something that I wanted to do, but I knew that it had to be done,” he reflected.
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