A mother knows her child.

The night Naiomi rushed her 10-year-old daughter, Kaydee, to a hospital in downtown Tampa, she knew she was very, very sick.

Twice that week she had taken Kaydee to an emergency center closer to their home. She was having stomach pain and weakness. Twice, Naiomi says, staff examined her, did some bloodwork, and sent her home.

“I knew something was wrong,” Naiomi says.

Within hours, the little girl was airlifted from Tampa by the LifeLine Critical Care Transport team to Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Kaydee was in heart failure.

“I will never forget Kaydee,” says James Thompson, M.D., an interventional pediatric cardiologist at All Children’s and one of the first to treat her in the hospital’s cardiovascular intensive care unit (CVICU).

“Here was the sweetest little girl getting sicker and sicker in front of our eyes,” Thompson says.

“We knew we had to act quickly to support her.”

Kaydee’s heart was failing as a result of a common illness — a case of the flu.

Typically, influenza type A presents with symptoms such as a high fever, cough, sore throat and nausea. Children can and do tend to recover reasonably quickly.

But Kaydee’s symptoms had not been typical. Neither was her body’s response to the virus.

Viral myocarditis occurs when a virus incites an immune response in the body, and then the patient’s own immune system attacks their heart muscle. It can happen very quickly.

“The heart is basically a bag of muscle that pumps blood around your body,” Thompson says. “When it’s not doing that well, it can impact multiple organ systems.”

The Long Road

Kaydee was placed on a ventilator soon after she arrived.

The surgical team initially implanted a small, temporary pump into Kaydee’s heart to try to take some of the workload off of the left ventricle.

But Kaydee would require even more support.

Within the next 24 hours, she was placed on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), a life-support machine that takes over the heart and lung function until the organs can work on their own.

The hours, days and weeks that followed all centered around doing everything possible to save Kaydee’s life and to help her to recover.

The young patient would undergo multiple procedures in an effort to support and restore her heart to normal function.

She was placed on dialysis to save her kidneys.

Some days felt like progress, and others, more like a step back in her recovery.

Kaydee’s mom learned to take each day as it came — choosing optimism.

“We had faith the whole time, believing miracles exist and that our daughter was not going to be the exception to that,” Naiomi says.

Summer Into Fall

Weeks turned into months.

Slowly, slowly, Kaydee showed signs that she was turning a corner.

Ultrasounds began to show her heart was functioning better.

Her bloodwork improved.

With the aid of her physical therapists, she was getting stronger.

Child Life specialist Mallory Adams helped to make the long days more tolerable as Kaydee recovered, helping her to communicate her needs, bringing in toys or crafts, and providing a listening ear.

“Part of my job is to help instill positive coping and to make the hospital more safe and fun,” Mallory says, “so I pour into these kiddos. But I often feel they pour so much more into me. These patients are truly the most brave, resilient and incredible kids I’ve ever had the honor to work with.”

Victorious Day

After 95 of the most difficult days of her young life, Kaydee was discharged from Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital.

It was a thrilling achievement for Kaydee, and a day that was equally joyful for the doctors, nurses and others who worked so hard to make her well.

“Essentially, all of the Heart Institute’s expertise was required to save her life,” Thompson says. “It wasn’t one person, or the surgical team or the cath lab team or the medical team or the ICU team. Every single person had to work to save her.”

Naomi recalls watching clinical staff “move the sky” to save her child.

“I saw these doctors striving to make sure that I didn’t have to say goodbye to my daughter,” Naiomi says. “She is a walking miracle. That has a lot to do with the care she received.”

Path Forward

As Kaydee continues to heal, her resilience and determination shine through.

She’s had to relearn how to walk. She continues to get physical therapy weekly.

She is seeing a neurologist to help her keep seizures under control, a result of strokes she incurred in the early phase of her recovery.

She is working hard to get back to a normal pattern of school and friends and all the good things that carefree 10-year-olds take for granted.

Her path has not been an easy one.

Still, Kaydee feels she is the luckiest girl in the world.

“I’ve been grateful, even for what I went through,” Kaydee says. “I know not everyone makes it. I’m grateful I’m alive.”