One mom faced a horrific medical emergency after her daughter’s case of chickenpox turned into a deadly flesh-eating bacteria.
Leanne Passey, 31, from England, said that after her daughter, 4-year-old Reign, was diagnosed with the virus, she was left fighting for her life after developing strep A.
It caused the little girl’s chickenpox to turn into a flesh-eating infection that became so serious, Passey thought she was going to lose her daughter.
“I just want people to understand that it’s so serious,” Passey told South West News Service. “It wasn’t the chickenpox; it was the strep that got through the wound.”
The woman’s daughter had to undergo a four-hour surgery to save her life, and she spent three weeks in the hospital.
Passey explained that Reign came down with chickenpox on July 4 and initially appeared fine, but a few days later, she developed a temperature and was extremely tired — which are classic symptoms of strep A. The mom also spotted a red ring around one of the sores and decided to take her daughter to a doctor.
However, when they arrived at the hospital, her daughter was reportedly told to take antibiotics and go home — an answer that Leanne, an aesthetic practitioner, refused to accept. She then took her daughter to a second hospital, where they allegedly were required to wait outside due to the contagious nature of the virus.
Then her daughter’s condition quickly took a turn for the worst.
“She’d gone past the point of screaming and was lying there, almost lifeless,” Passey recalled. “I picked her up and carried her through the doors and said, ‘Someone needs to see my daughter; I feel like she’s dying.’”
At that point, she told SWNS, her daughter’s temperature had neared 107 degrees and she was hallucinating.
They rushed her into surgery, and doctors said they had to make a large cut into her side to remove necrotizing fasciitis — a flesh-eating disease — and the wound had to be left open due to its fast-spreading and deadly nature. Reign was taken to intensive care, put in an induced coma to manage the pain and given breathing support.
Necrotizing fasciitis is a rare bacterial infection that spreads quickly throughout the body, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It causes the death of the tissue at and beyond the infection site.
Even after surgery, things still weren’t right with Reign.
“Her face and body were swollen — she didn’t look right at all,” Passey said. “We walked her to theater, and the surgeon explained it had spread and she was in septicemia – we didn’t know if she was going to survive.”
Miraculously, her daughter was able to recover from the deadly disease after multiple doses of strong antibiotics and three weeks in the hospital.
Despite being left with a large scar on her side, Leanne said her daughter is doing well now and likes to joke to people that she got her scar from “winning a fight against a crocodile.”