A 4-year-old girl went into cardiac arrest, landing in a coma with brain damage following complications from the flu.
Locklynn Boler first tested positive for the flu on Feb. 21, her family told WBNS-10. But three days later, the Chillicothe, Ohio, girl collapsed while using the bathroom at 4 am.
While her mother, Haley Dyke, did CPR, her father, Bradley Boler, drove them to the hospital, a GoFundMe established to help the family explains. But when they arrived at the hospital, “Locklynn had coded and went into cardiac arrest, a parent’s worst fear hearing a flat line on the hospital’s machines.”
While physicians working on Locklynn “finally got her heart beating after a couple of minutes,” the loss of oxygen to her brain was significant: Locklynn landed in a coma, and her family was told she had a “severe deep brain injury.”
Stock image of a hospital bed.
Getty
“We were told she would never walk again, she would never be able to eat on her own again, never be able to talk again, never be able to play with her sisters, brother or cousins,” the fundraiser, which aims to make their home wheelchair accessible and pay for other accommodations she will need, explains.
“The Locklynn we once knew is no longer.”
While most recover from the flu within two weeks, it can cause complications that can become deadly, as Verywell Health explains. It can causes sepsis (a life-threating immune response), cardiac complications like myocarditis (inflammation of the heart), as well as pneumonia, encephalitis(inflammation of the brain), and multi-organ failure.
As shared by Locklynn’s family on GoFundMe, she woke from the coma on March 2; on March 3, she was removed from the ventilator, but “there is no discharge date” from the hospital and has “many struggles ahead of her” as she is “now disabled.”
Locklynn’s father told WBNS, “There wouldn’t be anything I wouldn’t do to have Locklynn come in my room and go, ‘Can I sleep with you, Daddy?’ ”
