Bryan-Andrew, the 3-year-old son of Jasmine Shortland, contracted chicken pox in 2016.
But, aside from neck pain and swelling, the young kid was OK.
The 23-year-old mother dropped Bryan-Andrew and his brother Austin off at their grandmother’s house one day. She didn’t want her younger child at home, Ivan, to become infected.
Austin had previously had chickenpox with no issues, so Jasmine assumed the same with Bryan-Andrew.
But she would be fatally mistaken. This time, everything turned into a nightmare. Now, the mother wants to alert all of the parents out there so that this does not happen again.
Jasmine and her 21-year-old partner Josh had everything they could ask for. Three gorgeous youngsters with a full life ahead of them.
However, tragedy struck in 2016, and they experienced what no parent should ever go through.
Bryan-Andrew contracted chickenpox two years earlier, in August. As far as we are aware, nothing particularly serious has occurred.
Jasmine decided to drop Bryan Andrew and elder son Austin, who had already contracted the virus, down at their grandmother’s house one night so that her youngest son Ivan would not become ill as well.
The next morning, Jasmine’s mother noticed Bryan-Andrew had not awoken. No matter how hard she tried, the grandmother couldn’t wake up the small boy.
Paramedics raced to the scene, but it was too late. Bryan-Andrew was pronounced ᴅᴇᴄᴇᴀsᴇᴅ.
To say Jasmine was stunned would be an understatement.
“The night before he was running around. He was happy. He was laughing and joking. It just doesn’t make sense,” Jasmine told Daily Mail.
The mother recalls her son’s last words to her as “I love you”.
The loss was both unthinkable and irreversible. The family couldn’t comprehend how their son could die abruptly and without any major signs.
A few weeks later, doctors made a horrifying and unexpected discovery.
Bryan-Andrew had caught a rare and aggressive strain of streptococcus A septicaemia, generally known as A strep.
This sort of infection can result in blood poisoning (sepsis), which can make a person seriously unwell.
“No symptoms”
How did Bryan Andrew catch the infection? It turns out that he scratched his chicken pox.
“There were no symptoms because it was so rare he just had normal symptoms for mumps. He had no rash, nothing that you would normally have,” Jasmine told Daily Mail.
“His body was so small he couldn’t fight it and it turned into sepsis. It is just weird that there were no symptoms.’
Jasmine’s sole consolation was that her kid ᴅɪᴇᴅ in his sleep and did not suffer.
But the nightmare has not ended yet.
After losing Bryan-Andrew, the grieving mother realized she was ten weeks pregnant. However, she miscarried due to the high level of stress she was experiencing.
“I didn’t find out until I had stomach ache. It was absolutely awful. I nearly lost my life,” she said. “I lost 75% of my body’s blood. The nurses said there was someone watching over me that day and I knew it was Bryan-Andrew.”
Jasmine now wants to help raise awareness about the unseen dangers of chickenpox and encourage parents to be extra careful.
Please share this critical story with your Facebook friends!
