

He stayed in the Ecuadorean hospital for the next seven days.

Had the infection not been aggressively treated, it would have mutated and Wright might have lost his foot, his leg, or even his life.
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The bacteria is not accustomed to oxygen, so once it was in his foot, it was trying to hide from oxygen by eating away his flesh.īy the time Wright arrived at the hospital, the infection had eaten through the skin around several toes as well as some on the bottom of his foot it was getting down to the muscle in places. Wright thinks it probably got into his foot when he was moving sediment on the river floor while fishing. It's often composed of several kinds of bacteria Wright's lab results showed his infection had four kinds, one of them Mycobacterium marinum, an aquatic bacteria. Necrotizing fasciitis, the culprit that conquered Wright, usually gets into the body through an open cut, according to the Centers for Disease Control. In the latest episode of Naked and Afraid XL, which aired last Sunday, the bacteria spread to Wright's other foot, and the rest of the contestants started to worry that it could spread to them. "The feeling of losing my stronghold on the jungle and having to leave all of my survivalists, it was just the worst feeling I could have imagined, besides the fact that I thought I might lose my foot, leg or life," remembers Wright. "If I were to have broken my leg, I would have stayed and dealt with it when I got home."įor a few minutes, he seriously considered cutting off his toe and soldering it to stop the blood so that he could stay in the jungle - but his life was on the line. He was rushed from the jungle to a hospital three hours away. Within twenty minutes of getting the results, Wright was forced to tap out. "You can almost watch it eat away flesh." The Discovery Channel "Before you know it, I had some incredibly rare, flesh-eating bacteria - something you'd see on Animal Planet's Monsters Inside Me - that was eating away at the flesh on my toes on my one foot at a pretty excessive rate," Wright recalls.

Still, by day twenty, he thought he could get back in the game. The pain felt like someone was constantly carving away his flesh with a hot knife, peeling back skin and tissue one layer at a time.

In the meantime, Wright was taking antibiotics. The Ecuadorean doctor had a better idea, but didn't know the severity, and so sent a sample to the nearest lab over a hundred miles away. But by that evening, the blister had turned into an open sore, and he couldn't move his foot.Īn American medic took a look, but didn't know what it to make of the sore. Still, he carried on, finding more food and enjoying his triumphs in the Amazon. The pain progressed overnight, and in the morning he noticed a blister on his foot. Around day seventeen, Wright says his foot started hurting it seemed like he'd gotten a really bad bug bite among all the thousands of other bites. I was pretty much helping to feed this whole family of people."
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"I had figured out how to catch all this food. "I was doing better than well," recalls Wright. He was the only skilled hunter among all the contestants, and they relied on him for substantial meals. Soon after, Wright and his remaining teammate met up with the rest of the contestants, and Wright quickly became the pack leader. Early in this round, Wright made Naked and Afraid history when he became the first contestant to successfully hunt wild game: On a solo mission, he killing a ninety-pound jungle pig with his handmade bow and arrow and knife. He was a natural to join the cast of Naked and Afraid he proposed to his future wife on camera in Thailand.ĭiscovery Channel With one enjoyable season under his nonexistent belt, Wright was eager to return to the show. After two years in the Air Force, he received a medical discharge and returned to work at Lakewood-based Extreme Instincts. Wright has been a hunting guide since he was fifteen years old, and started his own survival business when he was in his early twenties. The camera crew was under strict orders not to help the contestants and to take their union breaks. Teams of three were scattered across the jungle, naked, armed with only a satchel, a cauldron for water, two tools of their choice and a small, fully equipped production crew. In the current season of Naked and Afraid XL, now showing on Sunday nights, Wright and eleven other contestants who were picked from a previous season of Naked and Afraid were tasked with surviving Ecuador's Amazon basin for forty days and forty nights. Actually, Wright met up with four different kinds of flesh-eating bacteria while he was a contestant on Discovery Channel's Naked and Afraid spin-off series, Naked and Afraid XL. As if hunting wild jungle pig in the Amazon wasn't enough adventure, Matt Wright had to go and contract an extremely rare flesh-eating bacterial infection.
