Jason Wood

The day before the Fourth of July, my 2-year-old son, Jason, was running around playing with his friends without a worry in the world. All the sudden he walked up to me and sat down, placed his head in my lap and just stopped. I looked at him and noticed the side of his throat was as swollen as a baseball and he said he felt sick.

I called his doctor’s emergency line and asked the doctor on call what to do. The doctor said give him some Motrin and if he is worse in the morning to go to the emergency room. I woke up to my son screaming at 4 am. I picked him up and tried to stand him up to put on his clothes. He let out a bloodcurdling scream and was not able to bear weight I had an urgency within me to get him to the hospital and did not question it. My husband, who is a fireman, was at work at the time, so I called him and told him we were on our way to the hospital. He said he would meet us there.

Upon arriving to the hospital, they immediately brought us back and started blood work and took x-rays of his knee, which lead to CT scans and then an MRI, for which he had to be sedated. Slowly his mentation was changing and the pain was getting worse. Orthopedic doctors told us he had cellulitis in his knee, along with strep throat, which was the culprit. (Sepsis and Strep Throat, Sepsis and Cellulitis)

I had no idea he had strep throat. He never complained. They decided they would do surgery in the morning to debride (removed the dead tissue) his knee. Well the next morning came and surgery time came and went. They kept postponing his surgery for more important ones. I continued to watch his mentation change. Finally, between a great RN and his stubborn mother, they came and got him for surgery.

We waited in the family room until they came to get us. I saw the anesthesiologist walking up to us and he asked me to come into a small room to speak with him. My stomach dropped and my knees went weak. This is never good to hear. He told my husband and I that Jason had started to crash at the end of the surgery. His oxygen saturation dropped and blood pressure plummeted, while his heart rate went through the roof. He was being sent to the pediatric ICU and put on a ventilator. He had gone septic.

We finally were able to see him and I felt the blood drain from my body. My helpless little baby boy was laying limp with a tube down his throat, multiple IVs controlling his vitals, arterial lines, cvp line and alarms going off. At one point a doctor came up to me and told me he may not make it through the night.

How did this happen? I was in shock. My husband and I did not leave his side that night and neither did the nurse or his miraculous doctor. He’s without a doubt my son’s angel. All night, medication after medication was put into my small child’s body to try and keep him alive. He was then diagnosed the irreversible septic shock and cardiogenic shock. All of this from strep throat? I sat there holding Jason’s hand wondering how In the world was I going to be able to bury my baby. It made no sense and I became angry. Angry at God, the doctors, myself….anyone. I refused to leave his bedside, along with my husband.

But hours turned to days and days to weeks, all the while he was on the ventilator and in a medically induced coma. After three weeks, the doctors felt Jason was well enough to extubate (take out the breathing tube). So they pulled the tube. He still was not himself and began to go back into respiratory distress. His body was lifeless. My husband walked out and grabbed the doctor. He told him to reintubate him immediately before he goes into cardiac arrest. The doctor immediately intubated and there we were again. Sedated, intubated and on a vent. A few days went by and the doctor came back on shift. He sat in the room staring at Jason, just trying to find a reason why he could not breath on his own. He grabbed an ultrasound and did it himself. He found a small amount of fluid in the bases of Jason’s lungs that was not allowing his lungs to expand, causing them to collapse. They then did two thoracentesis over the next week.

He developed a condition called ARDS in his lungs from the sepsis. (Sepsis and ARDS) This was a miracle. Jason immediately responded positively to having the fluid removed and the next day was extubated and did perfectly. After one month of pure hell I started to see a light at the end of the tunnel. My poor sweet boy had to be detoxed from all the heavy duty sedatives it took to keep him comatose while on the ventilator. He had to be put on methadone for two weeks and weaned very slowly from these medications. The absolute worst month of my life, not knowing if my baby was going to live or die. Sepsis is a horrible horrible illness. It almost claimed my little baby.

Source: by Alycia Wood (Jason's mother)