How what started as the flu turned into a nightmare for 4-year-old – Little girl lost her arms and legs

Mia Wilkison is a 9-year-old girl from Australia with a huge smile and two bright eyes. In the photos her parents take of her, she doesn’t stop laughing, despite the huge obstacles she has to overcome in order to live like the rest of her peers. And that’s because the girl got stuck when she was 4 years old flushe developed sepsis and doctors had to amputate her arms and legs.

Mia went from a healthy little girl within 48 hours to fighting for her life in what her mother, Amy, says was a nightmare. “We thought, okay, it’s the flu, we couldn’t imagine it would end in such a tragedy,” he told news.com.au and relayed by the New York Post.

Today the girl is preparing to take part in Little Athletics, a sports activity program in Australia for children aged 3-16, wearing her extra limbs, like the ones Oscar Pistorius wears when he runs. But until she got to this point, Mia’s journey was full of difficulties and she will need many more operations in the future.

Her parents have a very important message for the whole world: “don’t leave your children unvaccinated” they say and emphasize how important it is to be informed about various health issues, such as sepsis which can lead to death. When Mia got sick she wasn’t vaccinatednow the whole family do it every year vaccine of the flu. “The majority of Australians do not know what rot is or what they should know about it. We hadn’t heard of it either,” they point out.

The nightmare chronicle

One Friday in 2017, 4-year-old Mia was enjoying a morning full of play with her cousins. In the afternoon of the same day she complained of stomach ache and during dinner she vomited. The next morning the doctor who saw her diagnosed gastroenteritis, but by afternoon the child was babbling and disoriented.

Her parents moved her to hospital. That’s when she started complaining that her legs hurt. “Before Mia and I entered the hospital we had never been together even though we have a daughter two years older than her,” says her mother. The girl was diagnosed with influenza B and viral myositis, where cells of the body attack organs of the body with the main characteristic being the attack of the muscles and the symptom being muscle weakness.

The doctors sent her home to rest. By Sunday afternoon Mia had developed a faint purple rash on her leg and was back in the hospital, this time in the pediatric intensive care unit. He had sepsis. Professor McMillan explains: “Sepsis is a condition where an infection, like the one Mia had, spreads from one part of the body to the whole body and starts to become life-threatening. If it is not fatal, it can cause great damage to the body.”

The next day the nightmare continued. In fact, it got even worse. Mia’s hands and feet had turned almost black. Her blood pressure was very low and medication was needed to help her brain and other vital organs function. But the drugs significantly reduced blood flow to her arms and legs. The girl was on mechanical support for six days and on the seventh she started breathing on her own. He had lived but now he was starting a very long journey. As the days went by the damage to the arms and legs got worse. Within a week doctors were forced to amputate her arms below the elbow and legs below the knee.

As medical professor Alison McMillan points out, children under the age of five are particularly vulnerable to the flu, especially in recent years as, due to the coronavirus pandemic (which limited social contact), they have not developed natural immunity. As he points out, there is misinformation about the flu vaccine. He urges Australians to check with their doctor, remember to wash their hands and stay home if they get sick.