Karen Stark is scared.
From her battles with lung and heart disease, blood clots, osteoarthritis and most recently MRSA — a bacterial infection highly resistant to many types of antibiotics — Stark will learn in September about her latest cause of worry.
Then, doctors will take another look at a spot on her lung they fear is growing.
“If it has grown, in September they will do a biopsy to determine what it is,” Stark said. “It’s very scary.”
Regardless, Stark also will have in the back of her mind another menacing disease — MRSA — which has caused a series of ongoing headaches, literally and proverbially.
“It’s like I’m a ticking time bomb,” Stark said from the front porch of her small, aging home in the south part of Iola. “I just don’t know what’s going to happen.”
STARK’S story goes back to the mid-1990s, when she took up smoking, mainly to deal with stress of a crumbling marriage.
She never smoked heavily — Stark probably averaged half a pack a day during the next 12 years — but it was enough to cause serious damage to her lungs.
It was more than enough. Stark was diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease — COPD or lung disease — as she developed a chronic smoker’s cough. With that came two of COPD’s byproducts, bronchitis and pneumonia.
Trips to the hospital were not uncommon as the COPD took its toll on Stark, who eventually moved from Arizona back to her native Kansas City, Kan., then to Colorado and finally to Iola in 2009.
It’s her COPD and frequent hospitalizations that Stark believes played a role in her diagnosis with MRSA.
MRSA, methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, is an advanced form of the same staph bacteria that everyone has on their bodies, Stark explained.
But in this case, MRSA has developed to the point that it cannot be treated by most antibiotics.
In fact, Stark thinks her MRSA came because of her frequent use of antibiotics for her lung ailments.
And it cannot be cured.
“It can be active or go dormant, but I will always be a carrier,” she said.
There are two basic types of MRSA — the kind that attacks the body’s skin, leaving festering, infected sores that are highly contagious if the sores come in contact with another person’s open wound.
The second type, the one affecting Stark, is internal. Her MRSA is in her nose and lungs.
“My urine and my mucus are lethal, if the MRSA is active,” she said.
Its symptoms are remarkably similar to COPD. When it was active, Stark would be afflicted with coughing fits and have trouble breathing.
She would carry sanitizing wipes and breathing masks to ensure anything potentially infected would be wiped clean, for example, on trips to the grocery store.
The MRSA diagnosis in May 2009 led to months of blood treatments, which ultimately boosted Stark’s immune system to help control the MRSA.
It worked, eventually, to the point that a trip to the hospital this spring came back with a negative test for MRSA.
It has gone dormant. For how long is anybody’s guess.
BUT MRSA is still affecting Stark in other ways.
Because of her osteoarthritis, Stark has been unable to work and has received Social Security benefits since 1999.
And living on a fixed income has prevented her from doing routine maintenance to her home on South Jefferson Avenue.
She applied in 2010 for the Southeast Kansas Community Action Program’s weatherization program to help fund a number of projects to her home. It’s most dire need is for new windows and insulation to help keep the home cool in the summer and warm in the winter.
Her initial application was denied — officially placed in deferred status — because one of her bedrooms was filled with boxes.
They thought the room was dedicated solely for storage, making her home ineligible.
“I just hadn’t been feeling well enough to unpack,” she said.
Upon her appeal — which would have otherwise been successful — Stark notified SEK-CAP of her MRSA diagnosis.
The news led to another rejection, due to the exposed conditions work crews would experience while working inside her home.
“They didn’t want to work in there because I was sick,” she said.
Steve Lohr, executive director at SEK-CAP, declined to discuss much of Stark’s case because of privacy issues, but did say “we want to always do everything we can to provide these services to our clients. That’s why we’re here. We want to help.”
Stark’s case remains active. Lohr said SEK-CAP is continuing to gather additional information about MRSA and potential exposure issues before deciding Stark’s application. He also is huddling with officials from the Kansas Housing Resources Corporation, which funds the weatherization project.
Then, there’s the matter of convincing work crews and private contractors they would not be exposed to MRSA if working inside a home of a MRSA sufferer.
Lohr noted that MRSA is a relatively unknown disease.
Workers inside Stark’s home would be no further exposed to MRSA than anyone would be going to Walmart, replied DeeDee Martin, public health nurse with the Southeast Kansas Multi-County Health Department.
She noted the sanitized environment within Stark’s home, plus the fact that the disease has gone dormant. And, Stark’s MRSA is internal, not external.
“I’d have no problem” working inside the home, Martin said.
Because many are unfamiliar with MRSA, agencies should not consider their rules and regulations regarding the disease as apodictic, Martin said. Anything can change as more are educated about MRSA, she said.
Stark has a bit of advice of her own.
“If you don’t want to get MRSA, wash your hands,” Stark said. “That’s all you have to do, and you’ll be fine.”
Indeed, medical experts agree the front line of defense for MRSA, and a number of other diseases, is simple hygiene.
