Woman has ‘zombie’ flesh-eating disease after fleeing skunk

This woman had a run-in with Pepe Le Putrid.

A North Carolina mom’s leg suffers from “zombie”-esque flesh wounds due to a freak infection she contracted while fleeing an angry skunk.

“It looks like a zombie has bitten me,” Sharon Evans, 39, told SWNS of the flesh-eating affliction. “It looks like something ate my skin and it gets really big.”

The stay-at-home mother of six specifically suffers from pyoderma gangrenosum, a “rare condition that causes large, painful sores (ulcers) to develop on your skin, most often on your legs,” per the Mayo Clinic. The exact causes of the skin-ravaging disease are unknown. However, it appears to be associated with a defect of the immune system.

As a result of her “painful” condition, Evans is forced to live in a bubble because the slightest bump could trigger ulcers to form on her leg.

She first noticed symptoms of the gangrenous condition in November, about a month after she and her pet pooches had a run-in with an aggressive skunk.

“I’d let the dogs [two Chihuahuas and a pitbull] out at 2.30 a.m. and there was a skunk out there which I didn’t see,” Evans recalled. “The dogs tried to run after it and it turned on me and was running towards me like it was going to hurt me so I ran back up the stairs to get into the house and I hit my ankle on the step.”

She added: “It hurt but I had adrenaline because I was trying to get away from the skunk.”

Still, she seemed fine until a month later, when her leg scab “started opening up,” recounted the mother. Accompanying photos show the putrid wound, which evokes a “zombie” bite or the caldera of a volcano.

Evans initially expected the 6-inch, pus-filled scab to fade on its own, SWNS reported. However, the sores subsequently metastasized across her leg, causing so much agony that she couldn’t leave her bed for a month.

Then, a couple months later, she banged her leg on a car door, causing two ulcers to spring up like an epidermal hydra.

“It hurt really bad but I didn’t think anything of it,” Evans said. “There was no open wound and it didn’t cut me so I didn’t put anything on it.”

Then, four days later, “it went from bump to opening,” she said.

The unfortunate woman found her condition particularly perplexing as she’d been “hurt loads of times before and it never happened so we don’t know what triggered it.”

Alarmed, Evans went to the doctor’s office, and was prescribed a course of antibiotics.

After meds failed to remedy her condition, the patient was transferred to the emergency room, where medics initially diagnosed her with “cellulitis” and tried to scrape off the infection. They finally took a biopsy and figured out what was happening. Doctors were baffled as to how she contracted such a condition so late in life.

Unfortunately, “there isn’t a whole lot they can do apart from get better and there’s no preventative things apart from trying not to hurt yourself,” said Evans. “Every time I get an injury it happens. I have to be really careful. It’s like living in a bubble because you don’t want to get hurt.”

In order to avoid reigniting the rot, Evans has to travel down stairs sideways so she doesn’t trip, and cease all exercise and other activities.

“I’m always trying to be aware of my legs,” she said. “I can’t do things I wanted to do.”

In the event she does sprout a sore, Evans is left bed-bound, forcing her husband, Jason, 46, and children, Nayan, 16, Rose, 15, Angel, 9, Owen, 8, Quinn, 5, and Israel, 4, to take care of her.

“I can’t get up and walk, I had a portable potty beside the bed so I could go to toilet and lay back down,” she explained. “I couldn’t stand, I have to have someone help me. I feel like a bum and I’m in pain. I redress it every day so it doesn’t get infected.”

Of her family she said: “They’re awesome but it’s hard on them.”

Evans isn’t alone in developing a freak skin condition.

In March, a woman almost lost her leg after her dermis-picking habit caused her to contract antibiotic-resistant Staphylococcus.