After virus claims daughter, parents urge teens to get vaccinated
Parents of a 15-year-old Will County girl who died suddenly of COVID-19 last month are channeling their grief into a public service campaign that urges other parents to get their teenage children vaccinated.
Dykota Morgan died last month, less than 72 hours after first showing symptoms.
“She was a perfectly healthy athlete — softball, basketball, cross country, track,” her mother, Krystal Morgan, said in a video message. Dykota was an honors student with a 3.9 grade-point average.
Dykota was a freshman at Bolingbrook High School. Her parents want to spare others the grief they are experiencing. Their daughter had her whole life in front of her, full of potential and aspirations, hopes and dreams.
“Dykota wanted to be a positive Black role model,” her father, Rashad Bingham, said in the video. “That was the life I think she envisioned for herself. She wanted to be what little Black girls aspire to be.”
The Will County Health Department is featuring videos, pictures and testimonials from Dykota’s parents in a campaign that informs parents how children as young as 12 may receive the Pfizer vaccine.
COVID-19 has killed more than 600,000 Americans. Vaccines are effective against delta and other variants, according to health officials. An Associated Press analysis of data provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows 99.2% of COVID-19 deaths during May were among unvaccinated patients.
Dykota’s parents deliver a powerful message in their appeal.
“I don’t want any parent to feel this void that we have,” Morgan said. “Nobody should have to feel this. This is the worst feeling in the world, especially when you know you did everything you could to protect them. The only thing I wish I could have done different was get that vaccine for her.”
A one-minute video is circulating on social media. The spot showed up as an advertisement in my YouTube feed. The Will County Health Department posted a 10-minute video of Dykota’s parents on its website, along with information about vaccines for children ages 12 to 17.
In the longer version, Dykota’s parents related the agonizing and numbing final days of their daughter’s life. She died in the early hours of May 4, a Tuesday. She first showed signs of illness the morning of May 1, a Saturday.
Morgan had asked her daughter that Saturday morning if she wanted to play tennis or go for a long walk, activities that the family regularly did together.
“She said, ‘Mom, I just want to sleep,’ ” Morgan said.
Dykota’s parents were shopping at a home improvement center Sunday when Dykota called to say she was hungry. Her parents noticed their daughter was coughing as she spoke.
“I said, ‘I’m going to take you to get a COVID test,’ ” Morgan said. “The results were positive.”
Another daughter, Dyman, also tested positive but showed no symptoms, she said. The girls were quarantined in a bedroom. Morgan brought them chicken soup and set it on a stand outside their room. She monitored their temperatures and sanitized doorknobs and other surfaces.
“Dyman was perfectly fine,” Morgan said. “However, Dykota just started declining. By Monday she was moving very slow. It got to a point during the day where she could no longer get out of bed and walk the five steps to get the food off the tray.”
Morgan said she grew increasingly concerned as her daughter’s condition worsened.
“Then she said she didn’t want to be alone,” she said. “So we just sat in the room with her, the both of us, and talked to her until she fell asleep.”
Then Dykota started vomiting. “That’s when I called the doctor,” Morgan said. “The doctor said based on her symptoms, I should take her to the ER.”
Viewers of the public service campaign get a sense of the pain and heartbreak Dykota’s parents felt as Morgan describes her daughter’s final hours.
“She understood she had COVID and she asked me before we went to the hospital, ‘What did I do to deserve this?’ ” Morgan said.
At the hospital, Dykota had no fever but her blood pressure fluctuated, her parents said. Around midnight, when Dykota’s blood pressure dropped into the 40s, a doctor told Morgan that Dykota needed to be transported to Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago.
A helicopter was unavailable, and it was about 1:30 a.m. by the time an ambulance from Lurie arrived at Northwestern Medicine Central DuPage Hospital in Winfield. Doctors told the parents they had to put Dykota into a medically induced coma so she could travel comfortably and safely.
“They told us to come into the room and tell her we love her, and that we’ll see her when she wakes up,” Morgan said. “So we went into the room, we told her we loved her and we were so proud of her and she was the best daughter.”
At this point in the video, Morgan could no longer hold back her tears, but she recovered her composure and continued her story.
“I was saying all these things without realizing she was never going to wake back up,” she said. “I feel so bad. I wish I would have said something different. But I told her that I loved her. And I told her I was proud of her. But I never thought she was not going to wake back up.”
That was the last moment Morgan was able to talk to her daughter.
“She coded the moment we walked out of the room, and that was 2:05 in the morning,” she said.
In a medical context, “coding” typically refers to when hospital staff members call a code blue to describe the critical nature of a patient experiencing cardiac arrest or other serious emergency. It often means patients are not breathing on their own, or their heart has stopped beating.
Dykota’s parents sat in a hallway outside their daughter’s hospital room and watched medical professionals attempt to revive their daughter for 60 minutes.
“We sat in chairs just like this and watched from here, the doors were wide-open and glass, and we saw them doing CPR, and the nurses and the doctors worked on her and manually pumped her heart for an hour straight,” Morgan said.
A doctor finally told them they had to call a time of death.
“It had already done too much damage to her body,” Bingham said. “She had lost oxygen to her brain and there was no real coming back at that point.”
“That was less than 72 hours after she exhibited her first symptoms that Saturday and less than 48 hours from her confirmed diagnosis on Sunday,” Morgan said.
Dykota died one week before the CDC approved the Pfizer vaccine for children 12 and older. The Will County Health Department’s campaign, Dykota’s Story, is the centerpiece of a new vaccination drive that encourages Black parents to get themselves and their teen children vaccinated.
A health department representative said several parents have mentioned they brought their children to be vaccinated after watching the public service announcement featuring Dykota’s parents. The campaign potentially is saving lives.
“You can use all the hand sanitizer and disinfectant and stay in your little bubble but it can still happen,” Morgan said. “Your child can still catch this disease and they may not survive.”