A young boy who had small red spots on his body gave his parents a scare recently when he had to be rushed to hospital and landed in ICU.
Galway parents Patrick and Breda Ní Mhaoláin have shared their story after their son fellow suddenly ill despite them first thinking he had chickenpox.
Liam, 3, developed small red spots on his body which the couple thought was the common chickenpox but their son's condition worsened in a matter of days.
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Liam was rushed to ICU in the Children's Hospital in Crumlin and they would later find out the rare disorder that led to the frightening incident.
Speaking to RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta this week, Breda revealed how Liam developed lesions all over his body including his hands, face, in his throat and under his eye lids.
Eventually it was discovered that Liam had developed the very rare Stevens-Johnson syndrome which affects a persons skin and mucus membranes.
This resulted in Liam having to have eye drops every two hours day and night.
"Every time the door would open he would say ‘no doctors no nurse’ begging me to keep them away from him, but I couldn’t."
"There was a danger he might lose his sight … he was in danger of dying really. He wasn’t eating or drinking, and one night they thought he might have sepsis. He suffered so much."
Liam couldn't help but scratch at his eyes due to the lesions but doctors were fearful that this could result in him losing his eyesight.
An operation was carried out and Liam is now in the process of recovering, however the aftercare has been tough.
"If you saw him, it wasn’t a nice image. He had bandages on his eyes, and then another cover over his eyelids to hold the bandages in place, and he had stitches in his eyelids too. His arms were restrained so that he couldn’t pull them off."
"And you don’t want the doctors to be worrying about you instead of looking after the child. When I’d leave Liam, I would cry and cry, I couldn’t stop."
"And the worst of it was that I had spent almost a week in the bed with Liam, he wanted me to be beside him, but once they did the operation he had so many tubes and pipes attached to him that it was really hard to get beside him."
"And then on top of that he had so many lesions on his skin, if you touched him, his skin was coming off."
"So he didn’t want anyone touching him, so I couldn’t give him a little cuddle, he didn’t want kisses or for me to rub his hair. I couldn’t touch him. It was so hard because I couldn’t do anything to comfort him."
Thankfully after a few weeks, Liam's condition began to improve.
"He was hungry. The nurses asked me what he would eat, and I asked him, and he said pancakes! Everyone started running around looking for pancakes!"
"The dietician found him two pancakes, and sure he only took two tiny bites of pancake, but that’s what he wanted. He started talking about things. I was playing music for him – Hit the Road Jack. He couldn’t move in the bed, but he was pulling his legs up trying to dance to it."
After a month in hospital Liam was allowed to go home and has been improving day by day ever since.
"There’s no defect or mark on his eyes, thank God. We have to be careful with him out in the sun, his skin hasn’t healed completely, it’s still quite red… If you saw him, you’d think he had been scalded or had bad sunburn."
Following Liam's return home, Breda and Patrick, who've been together nearly 19 years tied the knot in the Twelve in Bearna.
"We’re together almost 19 years,” said Breda. “We had picked a date in May, never imagining that something like this would happen in the meantime. So Liam came out on Monday, we came home on Tuesday, and the following Tuesday we got married."
"There were just 18 people there, we had a great day. Everyone was so happy to be together again for the first time since Liam had been sick … and everyone was delighted to see Liam."
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