Peter Barr
by Vanessa Hrvatin
~As told by his wife, Dawn Barr
ON JUNE 15, 2010, Peter’s dog nipped his finger. The wound was so small that he put some peroxide on and forgot about it. That night he had the chills, but didn’t think much of it—Peter worked outside so he often got a touch of heat stroke from time to time. Three days later, he came home from work complaining of lower back pain and general discomfort. Throughout the night he became increasingly uncomfortable, and started to become slightly delirious. His wife Dawn brought him to the emergency room, where the doctors ran some tests and found that he had zero white blood cells. He was taken by ambulance to the nearest major hospital in Owen Sound, Ont.
Over the next two days, Peter’s health continued to rapidly deteriorate. The doctors ran CAT scans but they showed nothing. He had 13 IV’s in him, but nothing helped. Dawn kept mentioning the dog bite, but was continually dismissed, with doctors and nurses telling her it was impossible for such a small puncture wound to be causing this much harm. On June 20, 2010, Peter Barr died.
The autopsy reported attributed his death to sepsis caused by a dog bite. As it turns out the bite, which was so small that it didn’t even require a band aid, infected Peter with capnocytophaga, a common bacteria found in the saliva of dogs. It quickly infiltrated his immune system leading to sepsis, which caused his organs to shut down over the course of just five days. When Peter died he weighed 192 pounds—40 pounds more than what he weighed living because of all the fluid being pumped through his body to try and fight the infection. He was black from head to toe, because all his organs had shut down and his pores were bleeding out.
Peter was not one to get sick, and Dawn describes the experience as “absolutely horrific” and “mind boggling.”
“It was incredible how fast it happened, to see a healthy man just taken like that,” she says. “He shouldn’t have died and hopefully one-day people won’t die from sepsis. He’s missed a lot.”