Katie and her husband, Evodio, took their son to the doctor who “said it just appeared to be a bug and recommended Tylenol and ibuprofen be given intermittently, as well as lots of Gatorade,” Katie tells CafeMom. “I mentioned to her that his legs were bothering him, and she suggested he was probably just achy from being sick.” Katie trusted what her doctor told her and said that the diagnosis “made sense, so we went home and did as instructed.” Little did she know that her son was infected with a different type of bacteria completely. “We are so glad that she did because while we were at the hospital, getting countless tests, X-rays, and ultrasounds done, he went into septic shock,” Katie says. “And [then he] was rushed to the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit.” Things quickly went from bad to worse. “Doctors told us that he was very sick,” Katie says. “Probably the sickest kid in the hospital, and that they didn’t expect him to make it.” The infection had spread to Jonathin’s left arm and his right leg, and his ligaments were incredibly swollen. “The doctors initially had to go in and release the fluids so that the life-saving antibiotics could get to those limbs,” Katie says. Over the next six weeks, he had nine surgeries to help stop the infection from spreading. “They were all either debridements (where they go in and clean out any dead tissue so that it doesn’t make him sick, and also to make sure there was no infection hidden in there that they missed) or plastic surgery on his arm,” Katie says. And although at that point the status of Jonathin’s arm wasn’t clear, his doctors knew that they would have to amputate his leg. Katie also says that they considered amputating Jonathin’s arm as well “but he still had good blood flow to the fingers. So they kept the arm, but he had lost about 95 percent of the skin, as well as tissue and tendons.” She tells us that their family has tried to return to its favorite activities from before Jonathin’s infection. On the one-month anniversary of his discharge, “He did his very first 5K in which he walked the last five or so feet by himself with the walker, while complete strangers stopped to cheer him on,” she says.
