Georgia Student With Flesh-Eating Bacteria Finally Asks for Morphine After Losing All Four Limbs

The saga of Aimee Copeland continues. The 24-year-old Georgia student who contracted a flesh-eating bacteria after a zip-line accident has now lost four of her limbs, is having to endure skin and muscle grafts, and although she has tried to avoid taking pain killers, she is now requesting them.

(Related: New cases of flesh-eating bacteria hit the southeast)

According to the blog maintained by her father, Andy, Aimee was trying medication-less pain mitigation up until recently and now has asked for a low-dose morphine drip. Prior to this she was avoiding morphine because of her convictions:

Aimee is now taking pain medication in as liberal a dose as can be prescribed. If she even dared to refuse taking it, which she wouldn’t, then the doctors would most certainly administer it in an IV drip. Even so, the allowable doses of Morphine, Fentanyl and Lyrica are often inadequate to deal with the pain that Aimee is now experiencing. Please believe me when I say that Aimee’s refusal to use pain medication has ceased following her most recent surgery. She is now requesting it ahead of schedule.

Until now, Aimee’s pain has been focused on her amputation sites, the wound on her left side and, most recently, the her right thigh (the skin donor site). She now has two new pain centers: her abdomen and her groin. During the most recent skin graft, her surgeons were forced to take muscle from Aimee’s abdomen to create a flap over the iliac artery in her groin. She occasionally cries from the pain, but she stops because crying hurts her stomach. She says that she feels like a patchwork quilt, because her body is a collection of skin grafts and bandages.

Watch Andy speak in this ABC News report about Aimee's current condition:

video platformvideo managementvideo solutionsvideo player

Andy wrote on the blog that Aimee wished him a happy father's day on Sunday, however painful it was for her to speak.

"Sometimes being a parent is not easy and this is one of those times," Andy Copeland wrote. "I would much rather be the one in that bed. If I could take that pain away from her I would do it in a heartbeat."

Read more about Aimee's story and battle with necrotizing fasciitis here.