Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
A misdiagnosed sore ankle came close to killing Gypsie MacSweeney, but her health and outlook are on the mend.
By ROBERT KING, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times, published May 31, 2002
If Gypsie MacSweeney took her time walking across the stage Thursday at Central High School's graduation, it could be because she was savoring the moment.
More likely, though, it had something to do with an injury she suffered 18 months ago that still slows her pace. Originally diagnosed as a sprained ankle, the injury turned out to be something far worse. It would cause her such terrible pain that she would beg her mom to have the leg amputated.
Everything dear to her -- school, training her beloved horses, tutoring kids for her old kindergarten teacher, even her leg itself -- became consumed by the pain from a poison eating away at her ankle; a poison so strong that potent pain killers couldn't stop it; a poison, it turns out, that appears to have come from a spider she never saw. It was a poison that would change the course of her future.
To understand how far Gypsie fell, you have to understand how high she was riding in the fall of 2000. At 17, Gypsie MacSweeney had everything going her way.
Lois Hooper, a science teacher at Central, considered Gypsie a dream student. She had a sharp mind, a strong work ethic and a heart of gold.
Elnora Hill, a kindergarten teacher at nearby Pine Grove Elementary, saw the same things. For seven years, Gypsie had been coming by her classroom three afternoons a week to read to her students, tutor them or paint murals on the wall.
"She's the type of person that, anything I needed to do, she did it," said Hill, who had taught Gypsie a dozen years earlier.
And then there were Gypsie's horses, the true love of her life.
Hill remembers Gypsie bringing model horses to school in kindergarten when all the other little girls were toting Barbies.
When Gypsie was about 10, she acquired the horse that would become the center of her world. Tasha, an Arabian mare, was the friend Gypsie rushed home from school to be with. Twice, she took Tasha to 4-H camp with her.
By the fall of 2000, Gypsie and Tasha worked well enough together that they entered their first horse competition, a show at the county fairgrounds where they took home four ribbons, one in each category they entered.
"I was absolutely ecstatic," Gypsie said.
Karen MacSweeney said she'd never seen her daughter so happy.
Horses had, in fact, become a large part of Gypsie's world.
When it was time in high school to explore careers, Gypsie hooked up with local horse trainer Susan Downes. She saw herself following in Downes' footsteps and was even looking into a horse trainers school in Ohio.
All this business with horses meant Gypsie was spending a good deal of time in barns -- at Downes' Mondon Hill Road farm and on her family's property near Centralia Road.
As it turned out, she was also spending a lot of time around spiders.
A few weeks after her horse show success, Gypsie came in from work with a sore ankle. First, she attributed to it the residual effects of a bad sprain suffered months earlier.
But the pain intensified the next day at school. When she got home her mother confined her to the couch. Two days later, with the pain still there, they visited the emergency room at Brooksville Regional Hospital.
Emergency room doctors were at a loss to decipher the problem, so they referred Gypsie to an orthopedic surgeon. The surgeon thought it was an ankle sprain. He prescribed pain medication and two weeks of rest.
When the pain wouldn't go away, he began to suspect something worse -- perhaps even a cancerous tumor -- and ordered other tests.
When an imaging technician suggested that the wound looked like a type of spider bite, Mrs. MacSweeney began reading up on spider bites and pleading with the surgeon to consider a new diagnosis.
The swelling grew. The ankle started turning black. And the pain medication, which now included morphine being administered in a hospital room, wasn't making a dent.
When Gypsie started to shake and began to slip in and out of consciousness, Mrs. MacSweeney took matters into her own hands. She found a new doctor and arranged for an ambulance to take Gypsie to the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa.
Dr. Douglas Letson, an orthopedic tumor surgeon there, had seen enough tumors to know this wasn't acting like a cancer. Tests revealed that Gypsie had an infection so aggressive it had spread from her ankle into her bloodstream. If it wasn't stopped soon, she could die.
"She was in pretty rough shape," Letson said.
Letson eventually performed the first of two surgeries. What he found was an infection that had been eating away bone, muscle and tendon. Some of the tissues were simply dead.
Letson and an infectious disease expert could never definitively say what had brought Gypsie to the brink. But they decided the most likely culprit was the bite of a brown recluse, a venomous spider more common in the Mississippi Valley but present in Florida.
Their reasoning: The aggressive nature of the infection; the blackened, necrotic areas around the wound and the fact the MacSweeney's barn was infested with spiders.
All told, Gypsie missed nearly three months of school. With so much work incomplete, her report card for the fall 2000 semester was littered with Ds and Fs. "I'd never gotten anything less than a B," she said. "I'd never seen that. It was devastating."
In January 2001, she began tackling her makeup work and a new semester at the same time. She was rising before dawn to administer her own antibiotic treatments before school and working past midnight to reduce the pile of schoolwork in front of her.
By summer, Gypsie was back on track. The D's and F's were erased and A's and B's put in their place. Her senior year, just now complete, was everything she hoped it would be.
Gypsie finished her career at Central with an A average. In a class of more than 300 students, she was ranked 13th. She gives most of the credit for her comeback to her mother, who encouraged her through the valleys and even read her lessons to her when her head was swimming from the pain medication.
"I just thank God," Gypsie said. "I can't believe I did that. There were so many times when I wanted to give up. But my mom said not to give up."
Despite her comeback, Gypsie's life is different now.
Walking with a bad leg has led to back problems that make riding a horse too painful too endure. At least for now, she is giving up riding.
With that, Gypsie is beginning to focus on her second love -- the classroom. She plans now to go to the University of Central Florida and study art education. Her goal: To return to Pine Grove and teach art, perhaps alongside Elnora Hill.
Because of her new direction and the fact she can no longer ride, Gypsie has decided to put Tasha up for sale. Her little girl's dream is gone. But Gypsie doesn't consider the turn of events to be a disappointment.
"I think that maybe everything that happened was to tell me that you are not a horse trainer," she said. "That you need to be working with children."