‘Help one another,’ Bradenton mother pleads after COVID sends her daughter to the ICU

Kelly Lee and her 11-year-old daughter, Peyton, are no strangers to the medical system.

The young girl navigates life with Down syndrome, asthma and hypotonia, the official term for decreased muscle tone. Because of those conditions, among others, Peyton has grown familiar with all kinds of medical specialists.

But on Wednesday morning, her mother said the latest hospital visit was by far the most frightening. As Lee fought back tears, Peyton lay in a nearby bed, surrounded by chirping machines and humming oxygen tubes.

Lee said her daughter caught COVID-19 and checked into Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital on Aug. 25, shortly after the start of school. It’s unclear whether she was exposed on campus or in the community, but the ensuing illness became a test of physical and emotional strength.

Peyton, a Manatee County student, began her first day as a fifth-grader on Aug. 10. Holding a light blue lunch box covered in pink flamingos, she posed for a picture outside of her elementary school, a smile forming under her cloth mask.

After just three days, Peyton started falling asleep in her class, the mother said. Knowing fatigue was a COVID-19 symptom, they traveled to the Bradenton Area Convention Center for a test. It was negative.

Then a fever appeared and her daughter got a second test days later. It was negative once again, but Peyton grew sicker over the next 48 hours, so they went back for a third COVID-19 test. It came back negative.

Meanwhile, the mother and daughter stayed home as the mystery illness continued.

“I didn’t want her, if she had Covid, to infect anybody else,” the mother said. “I was trying to do the right thing by taking her out of school when she had any symptoms.”

Her intuition paid off. They went for a fourth test — this time at a Sarasota urgent care clinic — and it came back positive for COVID-19. Thus began the at-home treatments.

The mother checked Peyton’s oxygen levels and fought back a 103-degree fever with Tylenol. About one week passed, and though some days were better than others, she seemed to improve.

“I thought she had a really great day,” Lee said. “She was smiling and a little more active. I thought, ‘Oh, maybe we’re over the hump,’ but when she went to bed that night she was really struggling to breathe. It’s just amazing how all of a sudden it can turn.”

Peyton soon joined a growing number of COVID-19 patients at the children’s hospital, right down the street from the St. Pete Pier and the Albert Whitted Airport.

Over the last several weeks, the hospital saw one of the highest increases in COVID-19 cases since the pandemic began. A hospital spokeswoman said that 12 children tested positive in June — a number that spiked to 181 in July, as the highly contagious delta variant swept across the U.S.

And as of Wednesday afternoon, the hospital had nearly two dozen admissions for COVID-19, including eight children in the intensive care unit.

‘A lot of this is preventable’

Some of the patients were otherwise healthy children with no pre-existing conditions, said Dr. Joseph Perno, the hospital’s chief medical officer.

“Our staff are struggling,” Perno said. “Morale is low. We’re caring for the sickest of the sick. It’s frustrating when children above 12 are not vaccinated, parents are not vaccinated. People are not wearing masks in the community. You know, a lot of this is preventable.”

Lee’s daughter is too young to qualify for a COVID-19 vaccine, so she practiced wearing a mask before the new school year.

Peyton — who is sensitive to certain fabrics and clothes — can now comfortably wear a face covering, her mother said. But with fewer people doing the same in recent months, it offered little protection against the crowd of maskless people in local schools and businesses.

The daughter was forced to trade her mask for an oxygen tube at the children’s hospital. And when that failed to work, doctors gave her a new mask — one that hooked up to a BiPap machine that pushed air into her lungs.

“Anything that she does exhausts her,” Lee said on Wednesday, as her daughter rested in the hospital bed. “This morning she had breakfast and now she’s going to take a two-hour nap to recover.”

One day later, Peyton mustered the energy to leave Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital, freeing up a much-needed bed at the overwhelmed facility.

In hopes of preventing other families from going through the same ordeal, Lee is now pleading with Manatee County residents to protect themselves and others during the ongoing pandemic.

Someone could be infected and asymptomatic, she said, posing a serious risk to unvaccinated children and people with underlying health conditions — people like her daughter.

“It’s really important for everybody to work together and help one another,” Lee said. “One simple thing people can do is be considerate and wear a mask. If you’re not wearing a mask, keep your distance.”

This story was originally published September 3, 2021 at 6:00 AM.