K.J. is usually a curious, talkative boy with the cutest smile. Last month, his mother Talaiyah Stephens noticed something wasn’t right.
All her son wanted to do was sleep and “the only time he’d get up was when he had to use the bathroom or throw up.”
“When I first took him to the hospital, he had a temperature of 105,” Stephens said.
Doctors at one hospital didn’t know what was wrong, so she took him to the Medical University of South Carolina.
“He was in shock, meaning his body wasn’t pumping blood to vital organs so they were starting to shut down,” said Dr. Allison Eckard, head of pediatric infectious diseases.
She had a hunch it was multisystem inflammatory syndrome, or MIS-C, which some children develop after getting COVID-19.
“It is the immune system going haywire, which affects all the organs in the body,” Eckard said.
She began the standard treatment of MIS-C: Immunoglobulin, high-dose steroids and high-dose aspirin. But she also wanted to try a new treatment called remestemcel-L, which can target one of the most dangerous parts of MIS-C: Cardiac dysfunction.
K.J. was the first child in the country to get remestemcel-L for MIS-C, Eckard said.
“Within 24 hours after the first infusion, his cardiac function was completely back to normal,” she said.
So far, 54 children in Florida have had MIS-C, and seven of them were here in Central Florida. Five of them were from Orange County ages 1 to 16, an 11-year-old from Lake County and a 5-year-old from Polk County.
Stephens said she didn’t know about MIS-C before her son got it.
K.J. is now back home after almost two weeks in the hospital. His mom has a message to other parents.
“Most people think it won’t happen to them - which was me - I didn’t think it would happen to me, but it can,” she said.
© 2020 Cox Media Group
