If It’s Not the Crocs, Snakes, Jellyfish Trying to Kill You, It’s the Mud

When I woke up 1st January 2025 and thought about what 2025 might look like, I had a rough idea of the usual things: busy weeks in the clinic, Learn.Physio projects, starting the ACL Hub, recording Exercise Matters episodes, kids’ sport, school runs, and hopefully a holiday squeezed in somewhere.

What I didn’t have written down anywhere was: “Spend the first half of the year dealing with a rare, potentially life-threatening bacterial infection picked up from the mud.”

This isn’t an ACL story. It’s a life story.

And it’s also a gentle public service announcement for anyone living in North Queensland, where if it’s not the crocs, snakes, jellyfish or sun trying to take you out… sometimes it really is the mud.

The Quiet Danger Under Our Feet

Living up here, you get used to the obvious dangers. We know where not to swim, how quickly the sun can cook you, and that you don’t go wandering around where crocs and snakes like to hang out.

But there’s another risk that most people don’t think about unless they work in infectious diseases: the bacteria that live in the soil and muddy water, especially during the wet.

Melioidosis is one of those.

It’s a bacterial infection that lives in the soil and surface water in tropical regions. People living south of Mackay will probably go their whole lives never hearing the word. Up here, it’s a very real part of the wet season landscape.

Here is some light reading if you're interested in learning more

The bacteria usually sits low in the soil. When the rains come and the water table rises, it gets pushed closer to the surface. That’s when it can sneak into your body - through tiny cuts, through inhalation of contaminated dust or spray, or through ingestion or inhalation of muddy water, especially in things like flood events or near-drownings.

That’s the backdrop. I didn’t think too much about it at the time. Then January arrived.

A Date Night I’ll Never Forget

It all started on Friday 3rd January. Mum and Dad were in town, the kids were sorted, and Carly and I had a rare date night lined up. Just a nice dinner and a walk along the Strand. Nothing dramatic.

On the way out, I remember feeling a bit… slow. My walking felt heavier than usual. I felt warm, which is hardly unusual up here, but there was this vague sense that something was off. It’s always hard to tell in North Queensland - is it just another humid day, or is your body quietly telling you that something’s brewing?

By the time we were sitting at dinner, my appetite had disappeared. That alone is pretty un-Mick-like. I was sweating through the meal and feeling more and more unwell. We cut the night short, skipped our usual ice cream and coastal stroll, and headed home.

That night was rough. I had a fever around 38°C, plus a deep, nagging pain in my right glute that radiated into my lower back. I couldn’t get comfortable no matter what I tried. There were multiple showers - hot, then cold - lots of tossing and turning, and not much sleep.

The next day, I felt “off” again and ended up spending most of it in bed. At that stage it still felt like a nasty bug, but nothing more specific. Then things took a turn towards strange.

Over the next day or so, some new symptoms crept in. Every time I went to the toilet, something felt wrong. I was needing to go more often but couldn’t pass urine properly. My fevers worsened. I felt more and more unwell, without being able to point at a single thing and say, “That’s it.”

By Sunday night, we were hovering in that awkward space of, “Do we ride this out or go to hospital?” I had another brutal night of poor sleep, fever and discomfort, and by Monday morning I’d had enough. I turned to Carly and said, “I think I need to go to the hospital.”

Carly, being medical, thought it sounded like a urinary tract infection, which fitted with the symptoms, but she agreed we needed to get it checked properly.

The First Trip to ED

In the emergency department they did what emergency departments do: asked questions, took a history, did an examination, and tried to piece the puzzle together.

On paper, I’m not exactly a high-risk infectious disease case. I was 40 at the time, fit, healthy, a non-drinker, no major comorbidities. Based on what they could see at that moment, the working diagnosis was a UTI. They took bloods and a urine sample, told me the results might take up to 48 hours, and sent me home on antibiotics that should have knocked a UTI on the head within a day or two.

The instructions were simple: you should feel better in 24–48 hours; if you don’t, come back.

So I did what I was told. I rested. I took the antibiotics. I stayed off work. And I waited to feel better.

That’s not what happened.

By Wednesday morning, I’d had a small window where I thought I might be on the mend - taking my son to swimming lessons felt almost semi-normal - but once I got home, things escalated.

My temperature hit about 40°C. I could feel my heart racing even at rest. I was soaking in sweat. The urinary symptoms were worse, not better, and I felt properly unwell in that way where you just know something isn’t right.

I called Carly at work and said, “I think I’m getting worse.” She said, very calmly but very firmly, “Call the ambulance.”

The Phone Call I Won’t Forget

There’s an important piece of context here: Carly is an infectious disease doctor.

On the day I called the ambulance, she happened to be on her lab/plate rounds - going through culture results and making sure people across the hospital were on the right treatment. Meanwhile, the paramedics arrived, hooked me up, checked my vitals and started driving me back to the hospital.

I was in the back of the ambulance when my phone rang. It was Carly. I assumed it’d be a quick “How are you going?” check-in.

Instead, she said, “Your blood culture has come back positive for Melioidosis.”

That’s not the sentence you want to hear as a patient. And it’s certainly not the sentence you want to say when the patient is your husband.

My only previous exposure to Melioidosis had been during a uni placement in Darwin. I’d seen Indigenous patients come in very unwell, some presenting quite late, and some with severe complications - limb amputations, loss of fingertips, massive systemic infections. It left a strong mark on me. Melioidosis, in my mind, was never a “quick and easy” diagnosis.

Hearing that word and knowing it was now my diagnosis was surreal and sobering all at once.

Finding the Source

Once I was admitted, the focus shifted to where the bacteria actually was and how badly it had taken hold. We knew it was in my bloodstream from the cultures, but we needed to know where it was setting up camp.

Imaging showed that the infection had infiltrated my prostate quite badly, which explained all the urinary symptoms. There was also a spot in my right kidney, which, in hindsight, matched that deep pain I’d felt early on in my right glute and lower back.

I was started on IV antibiotics immediately. But over the next 36–48 hours, my urinary symptoms worsened to the point where I couldn’t pass urine at all. My bladder was full and uncomfortable, and I ended up needing a catheter inserted - something I’d never experienced before and, to be honest, could happily have gone my whole life without.

The doctors had a tough decision to make.

Did they keep trying to fight it with antibiotics alone? Or did they go in and remove the source of the infection?

In the end, they decided surgery was the safer bet. I had a TURP procedure where they went in through the urethra to debride and remove the abscess and infected tissue inside the prostate.

Afterwards, the surgeon told me the bacteria had basically destroyed about 80% of my prostate, leaving only about 20% intact. It had been doing a very good job of trying to take over.

The First Real Turning Point

Up until that operation, the antibiotics seemed to help a bit, but I still felt properly sick. The fevers, the fatigue, the overall sense that my body was losing a big battle - it was all still very present.

When I woke up from surgery, something felt different.

For the first time, I felt the tide turn. I remember thinking, “I actually feel like I might come out the other side of this.”

The fevers settled. My body felt less poisoned. I wasn’t out of the woods yet, but for the first time there was a clear light at the end of the tunnel rather than just fog.

I stayed in hospital a little longer to stabilise, and then I was discharged with a very long but clear plan: the marathon phase of treatment.

Six Weeks on a Drip, Three Months on Tablets

Treating Melioidosis properly isn’t a short-term thing.

To give myself the best chance of beating it and avoiding relapse, the plan was:

• Six weeks of continuous intravenous antibiotics

• Three months of oral antibiotics afterwards

  
  

So even after leaving hospital, I didn’t exactly walk out “free”. I went home with an IV line in my arm and a canister I had to carry around that continuously infused antibiotics 24 hours a day.

Every 12 hours, I’d have to change it over. It came with me to work, on walks with the dog, and into pretty much every corner of my daily routine.

The good news was that I tolerated the antibiotics reasonably well. My liver function bounced around a bit, which the team watched closely, but it stabilised and I didn’t feel too many obvious side effects. Physically, I started to slowly feel like myself again.

I returned to work after about three weeks. I was eating well, putting some weight back on, walking the dog regularly, and eventually easing back into the gym. It felt like I was gradually getting my life back.

And then, one morning, my lung collapsed.

The Collapsed Lung Curveball

It happened on a pretty normal Saturday. I went out to pick up a Coles click-and-collect order, and as I sat in the car I felt a sudden, sharp pain around my right shoulder blade. It really took my breath away. Turning my head hurt. Lifting my arm hurt. It felt like I’d pinched a nerve or done something weird in the gym.

Over the next 24 hours, the pain eased a bit, but I started noticing that I was short of breath just walking around the house or going up the stairs. It didn’t feel like cardio unfitness - it felt wrong.

By Monday, after dropping the kids at school and doing a couple of small jobs, I went in for a chest X-ray as the doctors had requested.

The radiographer’s reaction said everything. I had a large pneumothorax - a collapsed lung - on the right side. I’d basically been walking around with a deflated lung for a couple of days.

The immediate question was whether this was related to the Melioidosis.

Was there some hidden pocket of infection that had caused this? Had something popped? After feeling like we finally had the infection under control, that line of thinking was pretty unsettling.

They first tried to manage it conservatively with high-flow oxygen. For the cardio-resp people reading, it was about 15 litres per minute. Unfortunately, that didn’t reinflate the lung.

So the next step was a chest tube. They inserted a tube into my chest wall to let the air escape and allow the lung to reinflate. It wasn’t fun. It wasn’t comfortable. But it worked. My lung went back up, I was monitored, the tube came out, and since that episode in March, my lungs have stayed where they should be.

Another crisis navigated, another little bit of perspective gained.

The Mental Side and the Quiet Gratitude

One of the more interesting parts of this whole experience, for me, was how I felt mentally during it.

Historically, I’ve found hospital and ED visits pretty anxiety-provoking. There’s often a lot of internal noise, even if I look calm on the outside. This time, during the most acute part of the infection, I was surprisingly calm.

Part of that was knowing, very genuinely, that I was in incredibly capable hands - specialist teams, including my wife, who literally deals with this disease. Part of it was that I was also about three months into starting antidepressants to help treat anxiety that I’d been quietly wrestling with for most of my life. That support was quietly doing its job in the background.

Once the dust started to settle, though - once the immediate danger, the surgeries, the drip, and then the collapsed lung had all passed - there was a bit of an emotional hangover. There have been moments throughout the year where I’ve looked back and thought, “That was actually a lot.”

The stats don’t help either. Melioidosis has roughly a 20% mortality rate even in well-resourced hospitals. Out in less resourced regions, where people don’t always get early or appropriate care, that number can climb higher. It’s not a gentle infection.

On top of that, I was pretty atypical as a patient. The common risk factors include older age, diabetes, heavy alcohol use, chronic disease, and a lot of time spent gardening or in wet soil. None of those fit me.

At 40, fit, healthy, non-drinker, no comorbidities - on paper I shouldn’t have been the guy who ended up with a serious Melioidosis infection. And yet I was.

The flip side, which I’m incredibly grateful for, is that being fit and healthy probably gave me a better platform to fight it off once we identified it and got the right treatment in place.

I joke with my mates now that most men don’t get their prostate dramas until their 60s or 70s. I’ve already got my story in early.

But behind the jokes there’s a very real sense of, “That could have gone very differently,” and I’m honestly just grateful it didn’t.

Why I’m Sharing This (And a Little PSA for the Wet Season)

So why put this story out there?

Partly because it’s been a big part of my last year, and this is one way of making sense of it. Partly because it explains why, at times across 2025, my mental and physical energy might have been a bit patchy.

And importantly, because we’re heading into another wet season in North Queensland, and I want to gently wave a flag about something most people never see coming.

If you live up here, a few simple things are worth keeping in mind:

Be sensible with mud and floodwater.

Wear gumboots if you’re out in wet paddocks or muddy yards.

Don’t wade barefoot through floodwater just for the sake of it.

Be careful with high-pressure hoses on soil.

And if you’ve had a lot of muddy exposure and you suddenly feel unwell - especially with fevers and that “something’s not right” feeling - don’t just blame the heat and push through.

Go and get checked.

In Townsville, the usual yearly average has been about 10 Melioidosis cases. In 2025, there were around 90. A bumper year for all the wrong reasons.

Wrapping Up

So that was my 2025 Melioidosis journey: two hospital admissions, surgery that left me with only a fraction of my original prostate, six weeks on an IV drip, three months on tablets, a collapsed lung, and a fair bit of pain, uncertainty and reflection.

And yet, I sit here now feeling good.

I’m back in the gym. Back in the clinic. Back making content. Back being a husband and dad and physio and ACL nerd.

And that fills me with a lot of gratitude - for modern medicine, for the people who cared for me, and for the simple, normal days that follow.

If you’ve read this far, thank you.

And if you’re a fellow North Queenslander heading into another wet season: look after yourself, respect the mud, and don’t ignore your body when it starts whispering that something isn’t quite right.

Because up here, if it’s not the crocs, snakes or jellyfish trying to kill you… sometimes, it really is the mud.