Three days later, still in pain, she went to an emergency room, where doctors determined she had necrotizing fasciitis caused by the flesh-devouring bacteria Aeromonas hydrophila. She was flown to Augusta for the first of what has turned into a series of surgical procedures.

Among them has been a tracheotomy.

Her father recounted how her loved ones saw the inevitability of the amputations in the changing color of her hands from day to day.

"Some people may criticize my decision and say we should have prayed over Aimee and asked God to heal her hands. Trust me, this we have done every day," he writes.

There is uncertainty about how common such infections are, since no clearinghouse compiles statistics on their incidence. But Dr. William Schaffner, chairman of the Department of Preventive Medicine at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, estimates there are fewer than 250 cases every year in the United States. The reporting of such cases is not required by law.

The infection is fatal in about one in four cases, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says on its website.

The bacteria are "remarkably common in the water and in the environment," according to Dr. Buddy Creech, assistant professor of pediatric infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University.

"When it gets into those deeper tissues, it has a remarkable ability to destroy the tissues that surround it in sort of this hunt for nutrition," he said. "When it does that, those tissues die, and you see the inflammation and the swelling and the destruction that can be very difficult to control."

Meanwhile, a South Carolina woman undergoing treatment for the same condition continues to recover.

After seven surgeries, Lana Kuykendall's family realizes she "still has a long road ahead."

"We don't know what the next day is going to bring, so we're just trusting the Lord," her brother Brian Swaffer said Sunday. "We're taking it one day at a time."

Kuykendall was healthy when she gave birth to twins on May 7 in Atlanta but went to the hospital near her home in South Carolina a few days later after noticing a rapidly expanding bruise on her leg.

The twins are healthy, he said.