Chickenpox ate our boy’s flesh

Becky Cave, 33, from Bedford, thought her baby had the chickenpox, but then he was left fighting for his life…

Handing me his football as we played in the garden, my little boy, Charlie, 13 months, smiled. ‘Up!’ he squealed.

‘I think Daddy’s better at this game,’ I smiled, throwing my husband, Alan, 31, the ball.

‘Up! Up!’ Charlie continued to chant excitedly.

‘OK,’ Alan smiled, kicking the ball as high into the air as he could, while Charlie dashed off after it in fits of giggles.

A handful, our little lad kept us both on our toes.

When he wasn’t running around outside, Charlie was glued to episodes of Paw

Patrol or Peppa Pig. One morning, when I dropped Charlie at nursery, one of the helpers told me a couple of the children had recently had the chickenpox.

‘I expect Charlie will catch them soon then,’ I replied.

A few days later, when I put Charlie down for bed, I noticed he wasn’t his usual chirpy self.

I touched his forehead and he felt feverish.

‘You poor thing,’ I soothed, stroking his hair.

‘I think Charlie’s coming down with chickenpox,’ I told Alan later that evening.

The next morning, when I changed Charlie’s nappy, I noticed the first red spots on his tummy.

I kept him off nursery and stayed home to look after him.

For the next few days, I kept an eye on Charlie and the spots spread.

Soon they covered his whole body and he had a cluster covering his neck.

Itchy, he tried to scratch them, so I covered him in calamine lotion.

Then Charlie started to go off his food. ‘Open wide! Here comes the choo choo train!’ I said, weaving the spoon through the air.

But he just turned his head away and kept his mouth shut.

Prising his lips open, I spotted more pox covering his tongue.

‘Aww, no wonder you’re not hungry,’ I sighed. ‘That looks sore.’ I gave Charlie yoghurt instead. A mummy’s boy, Charlie always loved a cuddle with me, but that evening he was unusually clingy.

I couldn’t put him down without him crying and stretching his arms out for me to pick him back up.

‘He must just be feeling really poorly,’ Alan assured me.

That night, Charlie woke up a few times, but that was nothing out of the ordinary.

But the next morning, as I went to scoop him out of his cot at 6.30am, I noticed his neck had swelled to double the size. ‘Alan, come here!’ I cried. ‘That doesn’t look good,’ he said, examining Charlie’s neck.

Charlie was lethargic and no matter what I did to try and cheer him up, I couldn’t make him smile. He just lay there, barely moving. Our local GP wasn’t yet open, so I called the emergency 111 number.

They advised us to see a GP within the next few hours.

As soon as the doctor’s opened at 8.30am, I took Charlie in.

The GP took Charlie’s temperature and checked him over.

‘You need to take him straight to hospital,’ he told us.

Alan and I rushed Charlie to the paediatric ward at Bedford Hospital where he was hooked up to a drip and had fluids pumped into him.

We expected him to have to stay in overnight, but later we overheard doctors talking and caught them using the word ‘critical’.

‘What do you mean by critical?’ I cried, hysterical.

They explained that Charlie’s condition had deteriorated rapidly.

He needed to be anaesthetised and rushed to Great Ormond Street

His neck started to turn black

Hospital in London.

Alan and I tearfully said goodbye to our little boy before he was whisked to critical care, put in an induced coma and intubated to help his breathing.

We accompanied Charlie in the ambulance, alongside a team of doctors and nurses.

As each hour passed, more and more of Charlie’s neck started to turn black.

‘What’s happening to him?’ I asked, sobbing. But medics didn’t know. ‘We’ll find out,’ they assured me. When we got to London, Charlie was hooked up to machines and pumped with antibiotics.

His little body had almost doubled in size due to the fluids he was being administered.

Medics took swabs and we waited nervously for the results.

His body was covered in ice pads for the next 48 hours while he received round the clock care to try and control his high temperature.

Alan and I were taken aside into a room and told that Charlie needed emergency surgery to reduce the swelling and remove the black tissue at the bottom of his chin.

‘We’ll cut it all away, from ear to ear, straight under his lip to his chest,’ the surgeon explained.

But Charlie’s heart rate reached 227 beats per minute and his temperature was through the roof.

We were warned to expect the worst ahead of the gruelling sevenhour operation.

Hysterical, I couldn’t concentrate on what was happening.

Alan signed forms handed to him by doctors while I sat sobbing.

We didn’t think Charlie would survive the procedure.

We started mourning our little boy already, fearing we’d never get to hold him in our arms or watch him grow up.

We were offered the opportunity to have Charlie’s last rites read, but I couldn’t bring myself to accept that he might pass away.

Alan’s parents and my mum and dad rushed to be by our side.

Charlie was wheeled into theatre and while he was under, we all anxiously paced the corridors of the hospital.

Surgeons cut into the black

We all prepared to say goodbye

tissue and it started to bleed, meaning it wasn’t dead, so they took swabs and sent them for testing – cutting the surgery down to an hour.

Charlie had the life-threatening, blood-poisoning disease sepsis.

The test results revealed Charlie had Strep A which could be treated with antibiotics.

We were told Charlie was in the early stages of a secondary rare flesh-eating infection called necrotising fasciitis, caused by Strep A, which was covering his neck, causing big black legions to develop.

Necrotising fasciitis is a serious bacterial skin infection that spreads quickly, killing soft tissue.

Charlie got the secondary infection after scratching his itchy neck, which allowed the infection to get into his blood. Slowly, Charlie started to react to the medication that he was given and we started to see a slight improvement in his condition. But while Charlie was on the mend, his kidneys began to fail and then his lung collapsed. ‘My poor baby,’ I soothed, stroking his hand as he lay unresponsive in his hospital bed. We seemed to have a never-ending run of bad luck. Alan and I stayed glued to his bedside the whole time. It was touch and go a few times, but after 12 days in an induced coma, Charlie came around, but he was still so exhausted and ill. He spent a fortnight in intensive care, before he recovered enough to finally come home. He ended up with centimetre deep wounds on his neck and has now been left scarred from the traumatic ordeal after being discharged from hospital. Doctors have warned us Charlie will likely need to have skin grafts on his neck and he visits the hospital once every two months for scar care. He also could have possible long term hearing damage as he can’t hear low noises, which doctors think is down to the sepsis. We want to encourage other parents to make sure they go to hospital as soon as they think something is just the slightest bit off with their child. We never expected a bout of chickenpox to end up with Charlie having to fight for his life. Complications from chickenpox are normally rare in healthy children, but a parent knows their child and on that one morning we knew something was wrong. I hate to think what could have happened if we hadn’t taken Charlie in when we did. Now three years old, our little lad is back to his usual cheeky self, but if we had left it any longer, he might not have been so lucky.