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Even with seven years and eight rounds of antibiotics, Megan Owen couldn’t fight an infection brought on when she drank contaminated water on a mission trip to Brazil.
The illness gave her terrible diarrhea and stomach aches that drove her to the floor in a fetal position and prevented her from going anywhere that took more than two minutes to reach a bathroom.
For the first two years, Owen clumsily adapted her life around the awkward malady until she discovered she was fighting Clostridium difficile, a potentially life-threatening bacterial infection commonly called C.diff. Then came five years on the antibiotic rollercoaster—a round of treatment would temporarily clear it up. But she was the unlucky one in six patients with recurrent C. diff....