Quinn Reecer's story

After noticing a fever in my four-month-old son, Quinn, I took him to the doctor, where we discovered his heart rate was hovering in the 250s.

At the hospital, a lumbar puncture revealed he had meningitis. While we strictly follow recommended vaccine schedules for our children, Quinn was too young to have had the full schedule of meningitis vaccines.

When things escalated

From the hospital, things quickly got worse. He started having seizures due to the infection in his brain, and a CT scan and follow-up MRI showed he had a stroke on the left side of his brain. The seizures proved difficult to treat at first, but finally they began to slow and we noticed the antibiotics were finally working.

After two weeks in the hospital under heavy antibiotics, anti-seizure meds, and blood thinners, my son started to get stronger, although that wasn’t the end of our story.

A miraculous recovery

From the moment Quinn was diagnosed, everyone warned us that he’d almost certainly  be left with a disability. The most common disabilities our doctors mentioned were hearing and vision loss and cerebral palsy, or deficits in the right side of his body.

Somehow, miraculously, Quinn is now nine months old and has made a full recovery. His multiple hearing and vision tests have come back completely normal, and he has shown no weakness or deficits in his body at all. He’s meeting his developmental milestones on time or early. But our family has suffered, and I don’t know that we’ll ever fully heal from the trauma and shock and fear of watching our baby boy get so, so sick. We are so immensely thankful for modern medicine.

Final thoughts

Get vaccinated. Pay attention. The only symptom my baby had on the day we were hospitalized was a slight fever. My gut instinct told me to take him to the doctor just in case. The infectious disease team credits early treatment for Quinn’s miraculous recovery.

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