"He's really just like a zombie": Mother warns after son contracts rare virus from mosquito
A 6-year-old North Carolina boy almost lost his life after being bitten by a mosquito and contracting a virus. Noah Surrett of Asheville experienced brain swelling and seizures after he came down with La Crosse encephalitis and had to be hospitalized on August 4.
Now Noah is getting his bearing back, and on Monday even ventured out to play in their frontyard, but his mother LoriAnne Surrett says that the ordeal her son went through shouldn't be experienced by any other parents. Surrett said the pain was so unbearable for Noah that he could only think of screaming as a way of letting his pain out. “He screams out in pain from the headaches, and he’s really just like a zombie,” she said. “It’s scary, it’s really scary. I don’t want no parent to have to go through this," as reported by People.
She took to Facebook to write about the horrifying ordeal. LoriAnne noted that Noah complained about having a headache when she was driving her children to their grandparent' house. She then gave him a medicine for a headache but it did not seem to do the trick as even the next day he complained about experiencing the same. The next day LoriAnne got a call from Noah's grandmother saying that something was not right with him and he "wasn't himself".
When LoriAnne arrived, “Noah’s lips were blue, eyes fixed looking up and were completely limp. He had a seizure.” He had a total of three seizures and while they were in the ambulance, he was given an IV with fluids, and once he got to the hospital, doctors took blood and urine test and performed a CT scan, spinal tap, and chest X-ray in order to diagnose what had happened.
Speaking to TODAY, LoriAnne noted there was a moment when they were in the hospital and she feared that her son won't make it.
“Then all of a sudden, at 3 o’clock that day, he just sat up in bed and started talking to me,” she said. “It was just mind-blowing how much — just in a matter of minutes it’s like he’d come to life. It’s been very hard, especially at nighttime. He wakes up and he cries having nightmares.”
The family started a GoFundMe page with a $5,000 goal to “ease some of the financial hardship that comes from this type of situation.”
Medical professionals said that teh virus is rare. "Typically children under 16 are the biggest population with this,” said Brani Giles, a nurse practitioner at St. Francis Health System, WSPA reported.
LoriAnne now wants to inform parents how easy it is to contract the illness. “I am a mother of 5 boys and I am a firm believer in bug spray and all that 2 keep the bugs away and it still happened to my little man,” she wrote in the Facebook post. “Noah is a spunky little dude that sickness never brings him down so this is breaking all of our hearts.”
She added: “I don’t want to see another baby go through this. They said it’s like meningitis so they are treating it the same way. Use bug spray on your kid's check for bites. It’s not 100% preventable obviously but do what you can to try. I just wanted to let everyone know how this began and what was going on. I want to add that the Dr's have told me it's very common in this area but this is the first I have ever heard of it."