Colonized: Life with a Superbug
When Antibiotics Fail and Infection Becomes a Chronic Condition

About this book:

We have been taught that infection is a sprint: fever spikes, antibiotics arrive, the enemy falls. But for a growing, invisible population, the war never ends—it calcifies into a grim, daily occupation. *Colonized* pulls back the curtain on the post-antibiotic reality already unfolding in hospital wards and suburban bedrooms, where patients carry pan-resistant bacteria—MRSA, CRE, *Pseudomonas*, *Acinetobacter*—that no drug can eradicate. Through intimate, unflinching portraits, Maryn McKenna reveals what happens when "cure" is replaced by "containment": the yellow-gowned isolation rooms, the toxic calculus of last-resort antibiotics that destroy kidneys and hearing to buy weeks of peace, the exhausting domestic rituals of bleaching a home that looks clean but may kill you, and the quiet devastation of being turned away by dentists, surgeons, and nursing homes too terrified to treat you.

This is not a book of statistics or distant warnings. It is a dispatch from the borderland where acute medicine fails and chronic survival begins. You will meet Arthur, a retired engineer whose fractured leg now hosts a permanent bacterial city on titanium hardware, and Sarah, a transplant recipient whose chart brands her a biohazard, blocking her from routine care. You will witness the collapse of retirement dreams, the bankruptcy wrought by endless infusions, the fracture of intimacy when a spouse becomes a potential vector, and the desperate pilgrimages to experimental phage therapy clinics. McKenna maps the hidden architecture of this new existence: the biofilms that fortress bacteria in bone, the microbiome collateral damage, the medical PTSD of waiting for the next flare, and the clandestine support networks where patients trade survival tips no textbook provides.

Urgent, humane, and deeply reported, *Colonized* reframes antimicrobial resistance not as a looming apocalypse but as a present-tense reality reshaping thousands of lives right now. It forces a confrontation with the fragility of our medical covenant and asks a profound question: how do we find dignity, connection, and hope when the miracles have run out and the only victory is another day without disaster? This is the essential chronicle of the post-antibiotic age—written not from the laboratory, but from the bedside, the bathroom mirror, and the kitchen table where the indefinite truce is negotiated every morning.