It was Thanksgiving 2015 when animal lover Anna Giacomi set off to do something she’d done hundreds of times before — feed her favorite donkey at a local farm.
When the mother-of-two, from Georgia, bent down to reach for a pear from her bag, the donkey bit down on her arm and dragged her under the barbed wire fence.
What followed was a minutes-long savage attack where she was bitten and stomped on repeatedly, shattering her left arm and hand and fracturing multiple ribs.
Her injuries, although bad, were supposed to heal within months. But a litany of medical failures allowed Ms Giacomi to develop a flesh-eating infection that ravaged one side of her body. Three weeks after the attack she had her left arm amputated above the elbow and her left leg amputated above the knee.
LIFE-CHANGING: Anna Giacomi is pictured above with her legal team. She sued the hospital that treated her for over $40m and won
A CASE THAT BUCKS THE TREND: The donkey that attacked her. She said it grabbed her by the arm and dragged her under the barbed wire fence
Speaking about her injuries, Ms Giacomi told DailyMail.com: ‘I try not to dwell on this… but I’m dependent on people to help me with almost everything [nowadays].
‘From getting out of bed, getting my clothes on, bathing, toileting, cooking, cleaning, etc. Everything has been affected.’
She added: ‘I used to hike, volunteer at the hospital where this all occurred, and volunteer at the animal shelter. I miss those activities very much.’
Ms Giacomi said she does not blame the donkey for what happened or even has a fear of animals as a result of the infection.
She says she’d always loved animals and used to rescue cats and dogs that she found regularly.
She had also been feeding this donkey for the past five years, which was in a pen at a working farm next to a sign inviting people to feed it apples and pears.
Instead, she puts her life-changing injuries on one of the hospitals that treated her, which she successfully sued for $47million for past and future pain and suffering.
A jury in Georgia found the hospital — Union General Hospital — and her main surgeon — Dr James Heaton — negligent for failing to spot the clear signs she had gone septic.
The retiree has now had to move down to Miami, Florida, to be near her son — who helps her with daily care.
She fears she will never be able to return to her beloved Italy, which she left for the US at the age of 10.
After the attack on November 26, 2015, doctors initially cleaned and dressed her wounds, put her on antibiotics, and then — after she appeared to be stable — moved her to a nursing home.
But less than 24 hours after she was moved, nurses reported — according to court filings — that there was a ‘foul odor’ coming from her ankle and a significant amount of fluid coming out of it.
The next day they said her toes now had a green crust forming on them.
But the staff took no action, and her assigned surgeon Dr James Heaton — who has now been jailed for running a ‘pill mill’ out of the center — did not come to see her.
It took more than a week for nurses to act on her growing necrotizing fasciitis infection (pictured) and finally call a surgeon
At one point, a surgeon who entered her room where she had been left for days said it smelled like she was rotting away like a dead animal on the side of the road
Three days after her admission the head nurse took the decision to transfer her back to the hospital, this time Union General Hospital in Georgia.
Upon admission, nurses noted a ‘necrotic black area’ on the top of her left foot that was ‘about the size of a baseball’, as well as ‘dirty’, ‘weepy’ and ‘infected’ wounds.
But nurses took advice from the hospital’s personal trainer and alleged ‘wound care specialist’ Mr Ronald Westfall who said she didn’t need to see a surgeon.
When a doctor finally saw her, five days after her admission, he said her room smelled so bad it was like that of a dead animal that had been sitting on the side of the road. He ordered her to be transferred back to her first hospital, Northeast Georgia Medical Center (NGMC).
Ms Giacomi remembers little from this time, saying she was ‘out of it’ because of the pain she was going through and the drugs they were using.
But she does remember repeatedly raising concerns about her legs, saying they were in constant excruciating pain.
‘I don’t remember details at this point,’ she said, ‘but I know that the general surgeon who ultimately helped to get me transferred out of the hospital said my room smelled like a dead animal due to my infection.
‘I was in the bed crying and saying that no one would listen to me.’
Up to 1,200 Americans are diagnosed with necrotizing fasciitis infections — or flesh-eating bacterial infections — every year, which are fast-moving and happen when bacteria start multiplying in the tissue and blood vessels around joints.
It can arise in hospital settings in vulnerable patients if a wound becomes infected with antibiotic-resistant bacteria and then a patient is unable to fight it off.
Ms Giacomi is pictured above in a 2017 interview she did following the attack
Quick intervention is always needed with this condition to control the infection before it becomes advanced.
About 22 percent of cases lead to amputations, and in rare cases, it can also be fatal.
Ms Giacomi sees her case as a cautionary tale for what can happen in the hospital.
‘I want awareness that this happened,’ she said, ‘that an infection got out of control through no fault of my own’.
She settled with the commercial farm which owned the donkey out of court for an undisclosed settlement.
And this month she won her medical malpractice case against Union General Hospital, with a jury awarding her $47million for past and future pain and suffering.
The case is likely to go to appeal because of the insurance company, but Ms Giacomi remains hopeful that justice will prevail.
‘I’m so grateful to the jury who heard my case and spoke up for the truth,’ she said.
‘I feel vindicated. But I am also disappointed about the prospect of an appeal and how the defense can drag this out in the court system for so long. I remain hopeful for a just outcome.’
