NORTH ATTLEBORO — Kim Brown was a 38-year-old mother of two when she went in for a routine hysterectomy at Sturdy Memorial Hospital, in Attleboro. The wounds from her surgery never quite healed, though, and after a brief stay at home, Brown was rushed to the emergency room, the beginning of a medical nightmare that she says nearly crippled her.

Sometime after her seventh surgery in two months, doctors decided to put Kim Brown under for a long time. During 10 days in a medically induced coma, doctors at Boston Medical Center determined that Brown had necrotizing fasciitis, a rare, sometimes life-threatening disease with a nasty nickname: “flesh-eating bacteria.”

“It’s a well-recognized infection that occurs, but fortunately not that often,” says Dr. Irwin Hirsch, chief of trauma surgery at Boston Medical and the doctor who diagnosed Brown. “It doesn’t take much to know it’s there. It’s an awful looking wound and it rapidly extends beyond the original area of infection.”

More than two years have passed since her ordeal, and Brown, now recovered, has worked her way back to the physically grueling schedule of workouts and competitions that she enjoyed as an avid triathlete.

But the pale, taut skin across her torso — the result of a major skin graft to seal her open wound — is a reminder of that dark period.

“I’m not going to be wearing a bikini anytime soon. Those days are over,” says Brown. “But I am fine with it. Everyone has something. This is just my thing.”

Brown’s troubles started with a crippling, shooting pain in her abdomen after a triathlon in Webster, Mass., in 2004. Brown went to the emergency room at Sturdy Memorial, where doctors determined that she had developed uterine fibroids, or leiomyomata, which are round, benign tumors that can form during a woman’s reproductive years.

While not life-threatening, the fibroids were inflamed, due in no small part to Brown’s strict exercise regiment, and would continue to give her occasional and debilitating pain until they were addressed, doctors said.

The following February, Brown went under the surgeon’s knife at Sturdy for a laparoscopic hysterectomy to remove her uterus. But weeks after the operation, Brown continued to have abdominal pain.

“I was absolutely miserable and in a lot of pain,” Brown said. “I knew something was wrong.”

She returned to Sturdy Memorial, where she had three surgeries over the course of one week to remove infected tissue from her abdomen. Her husband, Gary, requested that Brown be transferred to Boston Medical Center.

“I was very confused and distraught,” Brown said. “My husband and I were concerned that they just didn’t seem to be able to get it under control.”

At Boston Medical, Brown underwent two more surgeries and a battery of antibiotic treatments. For a brief period, she said, it appeared she was past the worst of it. A high fever dashed those hopes.

The surgeries had failed to rid her body of all the infection. Doctors decided to operate for a sixth time after her hysterectomy, but rather than reviving her after the surgery, they kept her in a medically induced coma.

Hirsch wasn’t Brown’s doctor, but when he was asked to look at her rapidly deteriorating wound from the incision, he knew what he was looking at. As chief of trauma surgery, he saw a case like Brown’s every month or so, he said recently. A streptococcal infection — a hardier, more destructive version of the same bacteria that causes strep throat — had progressed into necrotizing fasciitis, Hirsch told Gary Brown.

“These things happen, and not just after a major operation,” Hirsch said. “The infection could come from something as small as a cut in the hand and can progress to the point where the patient can lose that hand.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in Atlanta, necrotizing fasciitis occurs when bacteria get into parts of the body where bacteria usually are not found, such as blood, muscle or the lungs. The infection destroys muscles, fat and skin tissue (hence the name flesh-eating bacteria).

There are about 600 cases of necrotizing fasciitis each year, and about 20 percent of those patients die, according to the CDC.

Hirsch made arrangements for Brown to be airlifted to Massachusetts General Hospital, also in Boston, since it was the only hospital nearby with a hyperbaric, or decompression, chamber, a piece of equipment necessary to treat the disease.

Used primarily to treat the effects of resurfacing after a deep-sea dive, gas embolism, or carbon monoxide poisoning, the sealed, high-pressure chamber provides an oxygen-rich environment that kills the offending bacteria, explained Hirsch.

While unconscious, Brown underwent two more surgeries to cut out infected tissue.

“The only option in this situation is opening everything up and cutting anything that does not look right,” Hirsch said. “If even a little piece of infection is left behind, you’re right back to where you started. So, from the start, you are committing yourself to a number of surgical procedures.”

Brown awoke from the coma in another room, at another hospital, with no recollection of what had passed since her last surgery at Boston Medical Center.

She was in the intensive care unit at Massachusetts General Hospital, with a feeding tube and oxygen being pumped into her lungs. A machine, called a wound vacuum, was tugging at her abdomen, sucking up excess moisture to speed up the healing process. She was in pain.

“I remember wondering if I would ever be able to run again,” Brown says. “The doctors weren’t sure of how mobile I was because of how much damage my nerves might have sustained.”

In mid-April 2005, the doctors sent Brown home to regain her strength in preparation for her 10th and final surgery, a skin graft from the top of her right thigh to her battered abdomen.

She remained more or less bedridden. At this point, Brown had been in and out of three hospitals in more than two months. She had dropped 12 pounds from her slight frame. An open wound covered her torso from her belly button to her left side and down to the top of her left thigh.

But four months after a successful skin graft, Brown was running again.

“Doctors and therapists told me it was the health of my heart and lungs that probably saved my life and allowed me to endure all those surgeries and the trauma that my body went through,” she says.

BROWN, NOW 42, marked her recovery with a return to the triathlon circuit in August 2006. At the Danskin Women’s Triathlon, in Webster, Mass., she completed the full course: a half-mile swim, a 12-mile bike ride and a 3-mile run.

“It was a huge accomplishment just to do it,” Brown says.

Today Brown continues to push the limits of her physical endurance.

In February, she and her husband ran the Tampa Bay, Fla., marathon, their first. Last month, she completed another triathlon, her third since the ordeal.

Today, Brown was to compete in her most grueling triathlon yet, an Olympic-distance triathlon (0.8-mile swim, 25-mile bike ride and a 10-kilometer run) in Lakeville, Mass. The side effects of her surgeries and skin graft are “not all gone,” says Brown.

“They are with me every single day. I put heat on my hip every morning and ice on my knees every night. I’ll never be the same again.”

But Brown is not bitter about her experience; in fact, she says the stress and pain it put her body through changed her outlook on life in positive ways, even if today she still doesn’t know why it happened.

“The fact is I got an infection,” Brown says.

“I’ll never know if I got it during surgery or in recovery. It was a fluky thing that could have happened to anyone, but it happened to me. It won’t stop me from doing what I want.”

pmarcelo@projo.com