Sandra Hocking's left arm and right leg are covered in deep, wide scars from multiple skin grafts.
On holiday in Zambia, the Melbourne woman stepped off a kerb into an uncovered hole, badly breaking her leg and tearing a hole in her skin.
Ms Hocking spent a month in hospital in Johannesburg, South Africa, returning to Melbourne to face more procedures as her body rejected the skin grafts and an infection set in.
The 75-year-old was, and still is, facing the possibility of having her leg amputated.
She says the real danger of the accident was not in the shattered bone but the antibiotic-resistant infection that came with it.
The infectious-disease team at Melbourne's Austin Hospital diagnosed her with pseudomonas, a superbug resistant to modern antibiotics.
The director of the hospital's infectious-disease unit, Professor Lindsay Grayson, says doctors were forced to return to the dark ages to treat the infection.
"We had to go back to a pre-antibiotic era, in terms of thinking, 'Well, prior to antibiotics, we would've used surgery mainly as the way to cure these infections.'"
Surgeons removed parts of the wound and started Ms Hocking on a course of two antibiotics long ago replaced with modern alternatives because they can cause kidney failure.
Professor Grayson says treating drug-resistant bacteria is becoming so frequent that Australia is in the grips of crisis.
The World Health Organisation has warned many antibiotics could become redundant this century, blaming overuse and misuse of the drugs.
The phenomenon occurs because every illness involves sensitive and resistant bacteria.
When antibiotics are taken, the sensitive bacteria are killed off, but the drug-resistant bacteria are left to multiply.
Some bacteria then infect others with their drug resistance.
Australians are among the highest users of antibiotics in the world.
In 2014, almost half of Australians had at least one course of antibiotics, with research showing at least half of them took the drugs unnecessarily for a cold virus or related infection.
Professor Grayson says urgent action is needed to address the overuse.
He is also calling for a coordinated response involving hospitals, GPs and infectious-disease researchers, and a new medical body to oversee it.
***
