Last year Jim Kinsey, 69, had six surgeries after contracting two “super bug” infections that ended with his lower left leg being amputated.

But he still considers himself lucky because he is alive.

Kinsey’s wife, Nancy, sent in a letter to The Billings Gazette’s “Thankful” contest about the Park City couple’s ordeal and their ability to appreciate their many blessings along the way.

The Kinseys recently talked about their long journey as Jim fought near-fatal infections in 2008.

Jim, who grew up in Washington, D.C., worked in advertising and managed a mall before he and Nancy came to Montana‘s Bitterroot Valley in 1985.

The couple, married in 1966, has three grown children and nine grandchildren.

Things started to go wrong early in 2008.

In February, the Kinseys went to Great Falls to care for their grandchildren while their son went to visit his wife in Virginia, where she was serving in the U.S. Army Reserves.

They stayed in the home their son was renting while his new home was being built. The house included a hot tub that their son reminded his parents needed regular chemical treatments.

Not knowing anything about hot tubs, the couple didn’t think about adding the chemicals before they took a dip.

The next day, Jim’s toe, the same one that had been slow to heal after losing its nail four months earlier, was several different colors and looked as if it had been broken in several places.

Realizing it needed medical attention, Nancy took Jim to a walk-in care facility.

While they waited for the doctor, Jim became incoherent and kept falling asleep.

When they saw the doctor, he took one look at the toe and ordered a blood test that showed Jim’s white-blood cell count was “off the charts,” indicating a massive infection.

The doctor immediately ordered an ambulance to take Jim, now in septic shock, to the hospital, Nancy said.

Jim would be in the Benefis Hospital for the next 11 days as doctors fought to save his life from a rare necrotizing fasciitis, more popularly known as a “flesh-eating bacteria.”

By the time surgery was performed the day after he arrived, the infection had spread up his leg nearly all the way to his groin.

Before surgery, Nancy signed a form giving doctors permission to amputate her husband’s toe, foot or leg, if they needed to save his life.

Although the surgery was extensive, included cleaning out the infection of his toe and making cuts up his thigh to combat the infection, no amputation was done.

The couple now believes that the bacteria may have been in the untreated hot tub and entered his body through the still-healing toe.

By the end of February, they were back home in Park City. Starting March 2, a home health-care nurse came every other day to tend to his toe and foot and to use a wound vac to suction infection from his foot.

During one visit, the nurse noticed an infection tunneling through the bottom of his foot and sent him to St. Vincent Healthcare in Billings, where he had a second surgery April 3.

This surgery addressed another potentially fatal infection — the MRSA bacteria, or methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus.

He returned home April 7.

On April 8 and every day for the next six weeks, he had IV therapy in the Stillwater Hospital in Columbus.

Nancy drove him every day to the hospital from their home in Park City for the 2-1/2-hour treatment to have a cocktail of powerful antibiotics dripped into his body.

On May 2, he had a third surgery to graft skin from his upper thigh to close a hole in his foot caused by the infections and surgeries. The graft failed because the MRSA had eaten away so much of the foot, Jim said.

June 12, he had a fourth surgery at St. Vincent to cut a tendon in his foot to aid healing.

After a couple of days in the hospital, he returned home to Park City.

June 18, Nancy saw Jim clutch his chest and that his breathe was abnormal. He was taken by ambulance to St. Vincent in Billings for a fifth surgery — a quadruple bypass surgery on his heart June 24 — followed by eight days in the hospital recovering.

Back at home on July 14, the home health-care nurse noticed that  Jim’s left leg was hot, indicating an infection, and told Nancy to take him immediately to his primary-care doctor in Laurel.

The doctor told them to go immediately to St. Vincent.

Because Jim’s body was struggling not only to heal his leg but his heart as well, blood flow eventually stopped to his lower left leg, Nancy said.

On July 18, his leg had to be amputated eight inches below his knee.

After a week in the hospital, he went to New Hope Rehabilitation Center for a week, learning how to adapt to life without a lower leg. His rehabilitation was hampered because heart surgery prevented him from doing any thing strenuous, such as pulling himself up or pushing a wheelchair.

In September, he was strong enough to start out-patient physical therapy for his leg.

It wouldn’t be until October that he could start therapy required for patients who have had heart surgery.

Jim’s recovery was complicated by an old neck injury he had before the infections.

Twelve years before, he’d had two vertebrae in his neck removed after a vehicle accident on the job as a security guard in Missoula. A teenager had rammed into Jim’s truck as he was parked while filing out a report.

He has taken medication for headaches since.

Jim’s list of surgeries and difficulties is so long it takes an hour for Nancy to give even a simple version of his ordeal.

But she does it without self-pity.

In their letter to The Gazette, Nancy talked as much about the caring doctors and nurses they met over the year as Jim’s trials.

“We had great doctors! We had great hospitals! There were caring home nurses! And fast ambulances!” she wrote.

They also wound up on friends and relatives’ prayer chains that looped around the country.

Their son-in-law Tom Yarnall, who lives four blocks away, and members of their Park City Baptist Church built a ramp into their home.

The Kinseys’ faith and taking one day at a time got the couple through the long haul.

“God is good,” Nancy said.

Jim, too, has the ability to see as least some of that year with a sense of humor.

Going into physical therapy at St. Vincent after his leg was amputated, he joked so many times that his missing leg was due to a shark or crocodile attack that parking attendants called him, “Shark man.”

One attendant, named Brian, took Jim, a longtime hunter, hunting for deer a year ago. Using his prosthetic leg, Jim bagged a deer near Columbus.

As much as he’s already gone through, Jim’s problems are not over entirely.

He used an American flag-decorated prosthetic leg for several months until he developed a sore at the end of the amputated leg. He now uses an agile motorized chair to get around and out of the house.

Despite what he’s gone through, he still thinks he’s lucky.

“I’m blessed to be alive,” he said.

On television, he’s seen other people who have survived the same types of infections he had, and some have lost more than one limb.

“There’s always someone worse off than you,” Jim said.

The couple has one more thing for which to be thankful.

Medicare and their supplemental health insurance paid all of their medical bills except for $4.95.

Contact Mary Pickett at mpickett@billingsgazette.com or 657-1262.