Local man encourages public to be alert for tick season after having toes amputated

TOLEDO, Ohio (WTVG) - Tick season is here and it’s important to pay attention to the pesky insects. They can transmit Lyme disease and sometimes cause infection. One local man shared the horrific story of his encounter with the insects.

“If they see something like this, don’t wait,” Tim Rosebrook said.

Rosebrook lost five of his toes to a tick bite. When he returned home from a fishing trip last July, he noticed that something had traveled home with him.

“I came to find out that on July 4th, I had found a tick between the toes and three weeks later, I come back to Adrian -- to Hickman hospital -- saw a doctor there, and said that it got infected,” Rosebrook said. “So they sent me to Flower, and they checked me out there, and next thing I know they took off the third toe.”

Flash forward to November, and Rosebrook found another toe turning colors. He went back to Flower Hospital and was sent to Toledo.

“That toe they took off right there in my room. It was infected that bad,” Rosebrook said.

Doctors later discovered that the infection had become deep seeded into Rosebrook’s entire foot.

“So we know that patients with critical limb ischemia -- which is what he had -- these patients are high risk of amputations,” Dr. Ahmad Younes, an interventional cardiologist/endovascular specialist at ProMedica said. “This is an advanced condition of peripheral arterial disease, where there is cholesterol plaque in the arteries that supply his foot, and that prevents wound healing if there’s no adequate blood flow.”

Normally in a situation like this, a below-the-knee amputation would occur. But Dr. Younes and his team were able to reconstruct some veins in Tim’s leg avoiding the major amputation.

“So in that whole week, we went with taking a toe off, and then we went to working on the veins on the right leg, and then the following day -- I think on the 25th -- is when we took all the toes,” Rosebrook said.

The moral of the story is to pay attention to your body.

“Not every tick definitely will cause patients to lose their legs, but we’re more careful with patients with risk factors,” said Dr. Younes. “If they have diabetes, if they have high cholesterol, if they’re smokers, if they have heart disease. These patients have a higher risk of peripheral arterial disease and we take any of their wounds seriously.”

But in this case, looking back.

“The word we use I think -- we’re gonna go to war. To keep this leg on. Is that right?” Dr. Younes said.

Rosebrook and Dr. Younes agree they have won the war.

“We did good,” said Rosebrook.

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