Last November, Jade’s son, Kaleb, was diagnosed with pneumonia and started on antibiotics. When he wasn’t getting any better and was in fact becoming more lethargic, Jade thought that it might be time to take him into urgent care in their hometown of Cochrane. However, when he woke up the next morning with sores in his mouth and on his hands and feet – so bad that he couldn’t even walk – she knew they needed to get straight to the Alberta Children’s Hospital.
When the triage nurse took one look at him, she escorted them immediately to a room and within minutes, there were doctors everywhere. Jade was amazed, but also in shock because this kind of attention and flurry of activity meant that something must be seriously wrong.
The consulting dermatologist came to see him and she reassuringly said, “We know what this. We need to do some testing to confirm, but I want to start treating right away.”
Turns out, Dr. Michele Ramien is a foremost expert when it comes to RIME disease – a severe skin reaction triggered by the pneumonia he had been suffering with. The sores on his hands and feet were so painful to Kaleb – but the most miserable ones were inside his mouth. He was admitted to hospital and started on pain meds to help him cope with the lesions that the team likened to second degree burns. “It was just so sad,” says Jade. “He didn’t even want to watch TV. He just laid there for a week looking at the ceiling trying to get through the day.”
All in, Kaleb was in hospital for over three weeks as he healed and recovered. Jade credits the kindness of the team and the doctors for getting their family through this experience. Kaleb told his mom that through it all he wasn’t really scared because the nurses were so nice and he knew they were there to help him. While Jade and her husband took turns staying with Kaleb, they were both amazed at how the team cared for them as a family and made sure they were coping well – even delivering Jade a coffee card on one particularly difficult day.
Kaleb continues to recover. Jade is grateful for the help available at the hospital for them – in fact, Dr. Ramien is leading a North American study of RIME that now has Kaleb as a participant. “It’s incredible to know that this kind of expertise is available to our kids, right in our backyard. Had we been somewhere else, he might not have been diagnosed so quickly,” says Jade.
Across the hospital, children and families are receiving expert care for common childhood concerns like broken bones and respiratory issues to those more serious complex or rare diseases. Community support for research excellence attracts these highly-trained and specialized experts to our hospital.
