In February 2011, Madi Allen, a healthy 12-year-old in Central Illinois, who loved playing sports, almost died from the flu. The influenza B virus resulted in her developing necrotizing pneumonia, where the infection triggers inflammation that destroys the tissue of the lungs, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), and her kidneys shut down. She was put on life support and dialysis, and was intubated for five weeks. She spent another two months in hospital and a decade recovering from the damage caused.
Allen, now 28, shared her experience with Live Science.
I was 12 years old when it all started. I was just a normal seventh grader, I played soccer and basketball. I didn’t really have any health issues beforehand — just sports-induced asthma.
That weekend, I started to feel a little sick, but nothing too bad. My mom kept giving me over-the-counter medicine and it would work for a bit, then once it wore off, it would get really bad. I’d planned to go to one of my friend’s birthday parties then spend the night with my best friend. I went to the party, but I texted my mom saying I should come home because I really wasn’t feeling well, which was not usual for me at all. That night I asked my mom to sleep with me because I just felt terrible.
That was Saturday. By Sunday night, the only position that I could get comfortable in was my mom holding me like a baby. My mom just held me all weekend. My whole body just hurt and I started feeling like I couldn’t breathe properly. That got way worse Monday morning.
We were waiting for my pediatrician to open up and my mom suggested taking a shower, saying, “Maybe that will help you feel a bit better before we go to the doctor.” She had to help me take a shower because I was so weak, I couldn’t stand by myself. She stepped away for a second just to grab a towel and said that when she came back, my lips were turning gray and my eyes were starting to look sunken in. She knew that something was not right so she called my dad, who was at the grocery store, and told him to just leave everything, that we need to get to the hospital.
Allen was put on life support and had to be intubated for five weeks after getting sick with flu.
(Image credit: Madi Allen)
Our local hospital is just a small rural hospital — everybody gets transferred out. They diagnosed me with double pneumonia and then sent me to a different hospital 30 minutes away that specialized more in kids.
My dad rode with me in the ambulance while my mom went home and grabbed a few things — she thought we’d just be there for a few days. By the time we got to the second hospital, I was in respiratory distress. They wanted to intubate me straight away but were waiting until my mom got there so she could talk to me — my dad did the best he could, but my dad didn’t know how to calm me down.
I don’t think the doctors even told me that they were putting me to sleep. My mom had to be the one to tell me. I remember being very scared. They put this mask on my face for the BiPAP [bilevel positive airway pressure machine, which delivers pressurized air to a patient] and I felt like that was suffocating me. It didn’t feel like it was helping at all, which, I guess, at that point, it wasn’t. They were just trying everything they could. I was begging them to take it off of me, crying and just saying, “one minute, just take it off for one minute.”
Finally my mom tried to calm me down and she’s like, “They’re gonna have to put you to sleep now.” I remember her telling me, “You’re just gonna go to sleep for like a couple of hours and then you’re gonna wake up and you’re gonna feel a lot better.”
My mom had to leave the room while they were doing that. As she was walking out the door, the last thing I said was “Mom” and then I put my hands in a heart shape. That was the last thing I did and the last time my mom heard my voice for five weeks.
After I was intubated, things got worse. I had to be put on life support so needed to be moved to a bigger hospital in St. Louis, Missouri. The flight team came to evaluate me and they later told me they didn’t think they were ever going to get me to Saint Louis. They thought I wasn’t going to make the trip. But they said my mom was begging them to help me, everyone in my family was begging them, so they did everything they could to get me on the helicopter. They worked on me for several hours — every time they tried to move me something would go wrong — but eventually they got me there.
The doctors had to call my parents to get permission to do surgery and put me on life support. My mom said that every time she heard my dad’s phone ring, she thought they were calling to tell them that I didn’t make it. They were told twice that it was more than likely I was going to pass than make it. They were trying to prepare my parents that I wasn’t going to make it.
After getting out of hospital, it took years for Allen to recover, eventually having part of her lung removed that had been badly damaged by the virus.
(Image credit: Madi Allen)
I woke up five weeks later, and it was very confusing. Everybody was told if I asked what day it was, just to tell me the day of the week. When someone accidentally told me the date, I started crying because my aunt was supposed to be getting married a few weeks later and I was worried about being at her wedding. My mom wasn’t there, so my dad had to calm me down and then he told me the wedding had been pushed to October so I could be there.
The second thing I was worried about was that I was supposed to take a test on the Constitution and that I’d missed it. I ended up taking it in the hospital. I was there for 93 days. I got out the very last week of school, so I got to go in on the last day of school and surprise my classmates and my teachers.
That summer, I didn’t really do anything besides go to doctor’s appointments. I was doing physical therapy, occupational therapy and speech therapy — literally all my time was spent at the hospital in therapy. I’d missed three months of school, but I got to start eighth grade with all my friends, and I ended up playing basketball again. But the next several years was a lot of hard work of trying to get back to my normal.
It probably took the rest of junior high and high school to get back to how I would have been before. It was a very long process and during that time I got sick a lot, so I ended up back in the hospital several times. And it was hard going through that as a teenager — I felt like everybody else is living their normal life, and I felt like I missed out on a lot. Looking back now, I still feel like I did miss out a lot. But I think we made the best of the circumstances.
During COVID, when I was 22, I kept getting sick, and the doctors finally told me that part of my lung was so damaged from the flu it was causing infections, so they gave me an option of getting part of my lung removed. It was a major surgery, but I did it and that was probably the best decision I ever made, because it’s been five years and I have not been in the hospital once.
I moved to Florida about three years ago, and I started working as a medical assistant in a pulmonary clinic. This semester I got accepted into respiratory therapy school, so for the next two years, I’m going to be in school for respiratory therapy. It’s kind of a full circle moment, to come back into the medical field, because there was a point in my life where everybody was asking me, “Oh, do you want to be a doctor? Do you want to be a nurse?” And I’m like, “Absolutely not.” I was still so sick that I was there all the time. I never wanted to be there.
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I went to college and I got a degree in criminal justice, but I never really knew what I wanted to do. I ended up getting a job at our local hospital — that first hospital that I went to. Every time they put me in the ER I just loved being there. That job made me realize that this is what I wanted to do.
When people hear my story, they don’t realize that if I don’t tell the end — after the hospital until now — they don’t realize that my life didn’t go back to normal after. It’s taken 10 years. And it’s hard. Some of the other family members that we’ve gotten to know through Families Fighting Flu, it’s difficult listening to their stories. Sometimes I feel like I have this survivor’s guilt. Their stories sound exactly like mine — but their kids didn’t make it.
Before I got sick I got the flu shot every year, but that year we just got busy and it got put on the back burner. Since getting sick I have always made it a priority to get the flu shot every year. I know it is not a guarantee that I will never get the flu again — but hopefully it will reduce the chances of it ever getting that bad again.
With thanks to Families Fighting Flu, a non-profit organization that promotes flu vaccination and raises awareness of the severity of the infectious disease through families that have been affected.
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