In February 2011, Maddie Allen was a healthy 12-year-old from central Illinois who loved soccer and basketball. Influenza B led to necrotizing pneumonia, an infection involving methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), and kidney failure. Allen spent five weeks intubated on life support, underwent dialysis, remained in the hospital for 93 days and spent the next decade recovering. Now 28, she shared her story with Live Science.
A sudden, severe illness
“It all started when I was 12 years old. I was a normal seventh grader and played soccer and basketball. Up until then, I had no particular health problems, except for sports-related asthma.
“That weekend I started feeling a little sick, but nothing too bad. My mom kept giving me over-the-counter medication, which helped for a little while, but once the effects wore off, it got really bad. I was going to a friend’s birthday party and was planning to spend the night with my best friend afterward. I went to the party and texted my mom to ask her to come home because I felt really sick. This was completely out of the ordinary for me. That night, I felt so sick that I asked my mother to sleep with me.
“That was on Saturday. By Sunday night, the only position I was comfortable in was my mother holding me like a baby. My mother hugged me all weekend. My whole body hurt, and I started to feel like I couldn’t breathe properly. On Monday morning, the situation worsened.
“We were waiting for the pediatrician to become available, and my mom said, ‘Maybe you’ll feel a little better if you take a shower before you go to the doctor.’ She had to help me take a shower because I was so weak I couldn’t stand by myself. She left for a moment to get a towel, and when she came back, she said my lips were gray and my eyes looked depressed. She knew something was wrong, so she called her father at the grocery store and told him to leave everything and go to the hospital.”
Allen’s local hospital was a small rural facility where patients were transferred elsewhere for specialized care. Doctors diagnosed her with double pneumonia and sent her to a children’s hospital 30 minutes away.
“My father rode in the ambulance with me, and my mother went home to get some things. My mother thought we would only be there for a few days. By the time I got to the second hospital, I was having trouble breathing. They wanted to intubate me right away, but they waited until my mom arrived so they could talk to me. My father tried his best, but he didn’t know how to calm me down.
“I don’t think the doctors even said they were putting me to sleep. My mother had to tell me that. I remember being very scared. They put a mask on my face for BiPAP — a bilevel positive airway pressure machine that delivers pressurized air to a patient — and I felt like it was suffocating me. It didn’t feel like it was helping at all, but I guess it wasn’t at that point. They were just trying to do the best they could. I was crying and begging them to take it off, saying, ‘Just take it off, just for a second.’
“Finally, my mother tried to calm me down and said, ‘I have to go to bed now.’ I remember her saying to me, ‘Just a few hours of sleep and you’ll wake up feeling much better.’
“While they were doing that, my mother had to leave the room. As she walked out the door, I said one last word, ‘Mom,’ and then placed my hands in the shape of a heart. That was the last thing I did and the last time my mother heard my voice for five weeks.”
Five weeks on life support
“After being intubated, things got even worse. I had to be put on life support and transferred to a large hospital in St. Louis, Missouri. The aviation team came to evaluate me, but later they said they weren’t going to take me all the way to St. Louis. They thought I wasn’t going to survive the trip. But they said they did everything they could to get me into the helicopter because my mother and my whole family were begging them to help me. They worked on me for several hours — every time they tried to move me, something went wrong — but eventually they got me there.
“The doctors had to call my parents to get permission for the surgery and to put me on life support. My mother said that every time she heard my father’s phone ring, she thought he was calling to tell her that I hadn’t made it. I was told twice that my parents had a better chance of surviving than I did. They were trying to convince my parents that I wasn’t going to make it.”
“I woke up five weeks later and was very confused. When I asked my father what day it was, he asked me to tell him the day of the week. When someone told me the date, I started crying because my aunt was getting married in a few weeks and I was worried about attending her wedding. My mom wasn’t there, so my dad had to calm me down. I was then told that the wedding had been postponed to October so I could attend.
“My second worry was that I was supposed to take a constitutional test and might have missed it. I ended up taking it at the hospital. I stayed there for 93 days. I was expelled during the last week of school, so I ended up surprising my classmates and teacher by going to school on the last day of school.
“I didn’t do much that summer except go to doctors’ appointments. I had physical therapy, occupational therapy and speech therapy. I literally spent all my time in the hospital getting treatment. I was out of school for three months, but then I was in eighth grade with all my friends and playing basketball again. The next few years, however, were a huge effort to get back to normal.
“It probably took me the rest of middle school and high school to get back to where I was before. It was a very long process during which I got sick often and ended up going back to the hospital several times. It was tough going through that as a teenager. I felt like everyone else was living a normal life while I was missing out on so much. Looking back now, I feel like I still missed out on a lot. But I think we made the best of the situation.”
Long-term damage and recovery
“During the COVID-19 pandemic, when I was 22 years old, I kept getting sick. Doctors eventually told me that the flu had severely damaged part of my lung, causing an infection, and gave me the option of having part of my lung removed. It was a major surgery, but I did it. I think it was probably the best decision I ever made, because I have never been hospitalized in five years.
“I moved to Florida about three years ago and started working as a medical assistant at a respiratory clinic. I was accepted into respiratory therapy school this semester and will be attending for the next two years.
“Returning to the medical world is, in a sense, a full-circle moment. There was a time in my life when everyone was asking me, ‘Do you want to be a doctor? Do you want to be a nurse?’ And I thought, ‘Absolutely not.’ I stayed there the whole time because I still wasn’t feeling well. I didn’t want to be there.
“I went to college and got a degree in criminal justice, but I had no idea what I wanted to do. I ended up getting a job at a local hospital — the first hospital I went to. Every time they put me in the emergency room, I really loved being there. After that job, I realized that this is what I wanted to do.”
Why Allen now gets a flu shot every year
“Even when people listen to my story, they don’t realize that my life has never returned to normal unless I tell the story from the time I was hospitalized until now. It took 10 years. And it’s difficult. Some of the other family members we have met through Families Fighting the Flu find it difficult to hear their stories. Sometimes I feel like I have survivor’s guilt. Their story sounds exactly like mine, but their children did not make it.
“Before I got sick, I used to get a flu shot every year, but I was so busy that year that I put it off. Ever since I got sick, I’ve made it a priority to get a flu shot every year. I know there’s no guarantee you’ll never get the flu again, but I hope it reduces your chances of getting it badly again.”
Families Fighting the Flu is a nonprofit organization that promotes influenza vaccination and raises awareness about the seriousness of the disease through families affected by it.
Source: www.livescience.com