Diagnosed in Mexico with flesh-eating disease, Edmonton woman couldn't come home for treatment

An Edmonton woman diagnosed with flesh-eating disease in Mexico couldn't get a medevac flight home because Alberta's health authority said no hospital beds were available here.

Maia Stock, 25, is now out of hospital and awaiting a commercial flight home.

On Dec. 23, Stock and her parents were one day into a 10-day vacation in Puerto Vallarta.

"At 3 a.m. I woke up and my leg was just super swollen and red and hot to touch," Stock said in an interview from Mexico. "I had a fever."

She rushed to the resort doctor, who told her she needed to get to hospital. She was told she might lose her leg.

She was diagnosed with necrotizing fasciitis, also known as flesh-eating disease, and pneumonia.

But getting back to Canada for the urgent care she needed wasn't possible.

"We were talking to a doctor in Canada too, about getting me home," Stock told CBC News. "He said, 'You just need to have it right now … you need it now,' or I could lose my leg."

Stock's mother, Barb Wilkinson, spent the next 24 hours trying to make sure the surgery could go ahead.

Stock's first surgery, in a Puerto Vallarta hospital, was on Boxing Day. She needed two other operations, the last of which was on Jan. 2.

"It's so much to navigate," Wilkinson said.

"Trying to find out what was actually happening and wrong with Maia, and and then negotiate with the insurance and negotiate with the hospital administrators, and then talk with the doctor back in Canada, and especially the crisis [Stock's diagnosis] on Christmas Day."

Work to get Stock back to Canada via a medevac flight had started on Dec. 26, before her second surgery.

"They were going to try and get her home. I actually naively assumed that would happen," said Wilkinson.