A 12-year-old scraped his arm during a basketball game at school. Four days later Rory Staunton died of septic shock.
- This is a warning to parents that you don’t always have to agree with the doctors.
- You can get a second opinion.
- Make sure if you go to the Emergency Room there is communication between the pediatrician and hospital and parents.
- If the injury and the illness are out of proportion, tell the doctors.
The night after the scrape Rory began throwing up and had a pain in his leg. He told his mom he was in intense pain and called his doctor. They told her to take him to the Emergency Room. The doctor said is was only a stomach virus, he needed to be rehydrated, and they needed to give him Tylenol and Motrin. This is where the problems began.
The ER at NYU Langone Medical Center sent Rory home without reading his lab results. The results showed his white blood cell count was high, which is a sign of infection. The next night his parents took him back to the ER. The doctors agreed it was sepsis. Sepsis is an infection and a body-wide state of inflammation. Rory was never given the treatment: antibiotics or antivirals with therapies to fight the inflammation.
“Parents need to know,” Rory’s dad, Ciaran, told TODAY’s Savannah Guthrie. “I don’t want any other parents to have to sit here on your couch. And that’s why we are here today: to warn other parents.”
They want parents to know the signs of sepsis and be aware that even a small scratch can lead to big problems. Dr. David Gaieski, a sepsis researcher said there’s no way to know if Rory would have lived if the problem was identified earlier. Some people die within an hour of the diagnosis of sepsis, others live. The point is that more people need to be aware of the symptoms. “If your kid has a scrape it shouldn’t cause a high fever or pain that is out of proportion with the injury – or in a different spot from where the scrape is,” he added. “You should also be concerned if your kid has an unexplained rash, trouble breathing, or a fast respiratory rate or lethargy without typical cold symptoms such as a runny nose, a sore throat or a cough.”
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