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Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff had a painful weekend in the hospital. He went in after he felt a pain like "a hot poker sticking in his leg."
"He has a very serious staph infection, but it wasn't a worst-case scenario," said Paul Murphy, spokesman for the Utah Attorney General's Office. That's what the surgeon at University of Utah Medical Center told Murphy this morning after Shurtleff's second surgery in just four days.
"Today they just went back in to look and make sure the infection hadn't come back and hadn't spread to where the metal plates are in his leg," Murphy said.
The infection likely started in Shurtleff's leg about a week ago, but Shurtleff was out of town and didn't go to the hospital. When he finally did Friday, the staph infection was discovered. Though serious, it is not antibiotic-resistant as feared.
The infection stems from a broken leg that happened last September. Shurtleff was testing out a Harley-Davidson bike he planned to ride the next day, during the "Fall Ride for Fallen Officers."
Shurtleff never made the ride because he spun on loose gravel and crashed. "I've ridden, like, dirt bikes and stuff, and the instinct is to put your foot down, which you don't do riding a big ole cruiser. And so my foot went down, and then the bike caught it, fell over on it and twisted around it," Shurtleff said.
Shurtleff broke his leg clean through in two places, but also shattered it in several locations. Surgeons put everything back together with rods and metal plates, but he's been in a lot of pain ever since.
"It's been hard for him to walk. Seven surgeries -- five on the leg, two on the shoulder -- and staph infection, one of the scariest things you can possibly get," Murphy said.
Doctor's orders for the next several weeks are for Shurtleff to rest, though Murphy says that's hard for the attorney general to do. "If it's up to him, he'll be here tomorrow. If it's up to everybody else, he won't be here for quite a while," Murphy said.
It could be up to six weeks that Shurtleff's desk remains empty, as he spends time at home resting and recovering.
E-mail: abutterfield@ksl.com
