Girl, 12, diagnosed with flesh-eating bacteria after Florida beach trip

INDIANAPOLIS – Until Michelle Brown saw the term “necrotizing fasciitis” written on the wall in her daughter’s hospital room at Riley Hospital for Children, she did not know what exactly had landed the 12-year-old in the hospital’s intensive care unit.

And only after turning to the Internet, did the Mooresville mother realize that in lay terms that condition translates into the much scarier term flesh-eating bacteria, a rare but potentially deadly disease that kills one in three people who develop it.

Brown’s daughter Kylei Parker was fortunate on two fronts, her Riley doctors say. Not only did she survive her illness, she did so without losing any limbs.

But now her mother is sharing her story with others to raise awareness of this bacterial infection that spreads quickly and can hit at any time.

“I learned and went through dealing with it in a very short time frame and it got very critical,” Brown said. “I feel very fortunate and lucky that she survived for one and that she didn’t have to have anything amputated.”

The ordeal likely began innocently enough. A few days before the family left for vacation in the Florida Panhandle at the beginning of this month, Kylei scraped her big toe on a skateboard.

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The wound had not healed completely a few days later when she waded in the waters near Destin, where the family was vacationing.

One day later, she complained to her mother of pain in her calf, which her mother figured was just a Charley horse. As the pain worsened the next day, Kylei started to walk on her toes, perplexing Brown somewhat.

But the next day the family was scheduled to make the drive back to Mooresville. As soon as Kylei awoke, Brown realized this was something serious. Her daughter still could not walk and she had to carry her around on her back.

Somewhere in Alabama, Brown called her doctor’s office in Indiana and made an appointment for the next day.

Less than 12 hours after they pulled into their driveway, Brown and Kylei were at the doctor’s office. By this point her leg had swelled up and the doctors thought it could be a blood clot.

Brown realized the situation was serious when the doctor examining her daughter’s leg told her to go home, pack a bag and go immediately to the emergency room at Riley Hospital for Children.

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“That was my red flag that something’s wrong because they don’t normally tell you to go home and pack clothes and go to the ER,” she said.

By the time they reached the emergency room, Kylei’s condition was dire. Her temperature shot up from 99.9 to 103 in the first half hour they were in the hospital.

Doctors recognized she was entering septic shock.

As they worked to address the symptoms caused by the sepsis, they sought to determine the source of the infection.

Kylei’s swollen leg led them to wonder whether the bacteria had gone deep enough to enter the fascia of her muscles, causing the tissue to die.

Dr. Kamal Abulebda, a pediatric intensivist at Riley who cared for Kylei in the intensive care unit, doesn’t see the condition very often. But he has seen patients with it die and he did not want to take any chances.

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The only way to tell for sure would be to order an MRI. When the MRI revealed signs that tissue had already begun to die, there was no time to waste. Kylei was rushed into surgery to try to halt the infection’s spread.

"She’s very lucky,” Abulebda said. “I suspect the necrotizing fasciitis had developed over the last few hours before she came to us and we caught it in time.”

Still, Kylei, a seventh-grader at Monrovia Middle School, was far from out of the woods. She spent the next week in Riley and underwent three surgeries. She’s still on antibiotics and pain medicine and will have to do physical therapy to get her walking on her own again.

Described by her mother as a “go-getter,” Kylei was supposed to play second base in a softball tournament the day after she returned. Her team wound up dedicating their tournament to her.

Doctors were never able to determine which specific bacteria was the culprit, Abulebda said.

Still, Brown said, she’s not planning any more beach vacations.

“That’s just a chance that I don’t want to take,” she said.

A GoFundMe campaign has been established to help Kylei and her family with medical bills and expenses.

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Follow Shari Rudavsky on Twitter: @srudavsky.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Girl, 12, diagnosed with flesh-eating bacteria after Florida beach trip