A loving mother and teacher has died after contracting a drug-resistant superbug that is increasingly prevalent in the US.
Stephanie Spoor, 64, was hospitalized with a sinus infection last November in Barrington, just outside Chicago.
But as the weeks went by, with no signs of progress, it became clear Spoor's case was hardly something innocuous - and it wasn't just because of her lupus, an autoimmune disease.
Baffled, doctors sent her to specialist units at Rush University, then Northwestern, the top hospital in Illinois state, the family explained on a GoFundMe page.
It wasn't until mid-January 2019 that doctors realized Spoor had contracted Candida auris, a harmful form of yeast that is resistant to most drugs, with a 60 percent mortality rate.
She died on February 11, days after one of her sons Zack married his fiancee Carley at her bedside in hospital gowns, the New York Times reported.
Stephanie Spoor (pictured in hospital) contracted Candida auris, a deadly and increasingly ubiquitous superbug, while battling a sinus infection. Days before she passed, her son Zack and his fiancee Carley got married at her bedside (pictured together, right, with Stephanie and her husband Gregory)
'She was our mother, wife, sister, aunt, nonna, friend, teacher, colleague, confidant, constant-cheerleader, and beacon in a sometimes dark and tumultuous sea,' one of Stephanie's sons Jason wrote on the family's GoFundMe page
C auris, once rare, was first identified in 2009 in Japan.
Between 2013 and April 2017, there had been 66 cases in the US.
Now, there have been 587, with 30 more probable cases.
It has been spreading rapidly across the world, and within the US, hitting New York, Illinois, and New Jersey the hardest (with 300, 144, and 104 infections respectively since 2013).
'It's
