A 4-year-old girl in Iowa nearly died and is now blind because of the flu, and her parents have a message: Get your child vaccinated.
“If I can stop one child from getting sick, that’s what I want to do,” Amanda Phillips told WHO-TV 13. “It’s terrible to see your child suffer like this.”
Jade DeLucia, who did not receive a flu shot this season, caught the flu a few days before Christmas and spent nearly two weeks in the intensive care unit at the University of Iowa Stead Family Children’s Hospital.
“She is lucky to be alive,” Dr. Theresa Czech, one of her doctors, told WHO-TV 13. “She’s a little fighter. And I think she’s super lucky.”
On Christmas Day the girl's parents found out the flu had affected her brain.Called encephalopathy, it’s a known complication of the flu, according to the CDC.
Doctors showed Jade’s parents the MRI results. Her brain was “lit up like a Christmas tree,” her mother remembers.
Her parents, who’ve missed work to care for Jade and face medical bills, have started a GoFundMe page
Every year, dozens of children die from the flu, and most of them had not received a flu shot, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Thousands more children are hospitalized.
Many of those who becomes seriously ill or died were perfectly healthy before they contracted the flu.
(Photo: WHO-TV 13)