2 weeks Ago By Liam De Brun
Kathryn Thomas has reflected on rushing her daughter to the hospital after she contracted RSV at just three weeks old. Causing coughs and colds, RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) is a common virus that tends to affect very young children and can be very serious for those under the age of four if left untreated. Also potentially serious for children and adults with an underlying lung or heart condition, people with a weakened immune system or adults aged 65 years and older, symptoms for RSV include a runny nose, coughing and sneezing.
With a new study finding that s only 51% of parents are aware of RSV, former Operation Transformation presenter Kathryn appeared on Newstalk’s The Pat Kenny show this week to share her youngest child Grace’s story. ‘Everything was going swimmingly, we had everybody around with cuddles and kisses and we were walking Ellie to school. At about three weeks and two days, I noticed that she was quite congested [with a] big blocked nose.
‘I knew because when I tried to feed her she was pulling herself away from the breast. I didn’t think anything about it; I thought [it was] a little cold – and because Ellie my eldest wasn’t sick, I wasn’t too concerned. ‘The only thing I knew at that stage as a mother to be panicking about was if the child had a temperature,’ she said.
Four days later, Grace was still ‘not feeding very well’ as her ‘cough started getting worse’, becoming very congested and causing green mucus. ‘I was at the school gate and one of the mothers looked into the buggy and I said, “I don’t want to be clogging up the waiting rooms, it’s just a head cold”. She said, “if I were you don’t be worried about that and off you go”,’ Kathryn recalled.
Bringing Grace to the Emergency Department at Crumlin Children’s Hospital, Kathryn was left heartbroken when she wasn’t allowed to be in the room with her infant daughter. ‘They took her temperature – I had been taking her temperature – and she had a slightly raised temperature. They basically took her straight in, they did a spinal lumbar puncture on her.
‘They wouldn’t let me into the room or advised I didn’t go in and they just had to check that it wasn’t meningitis. Within about an hour they were able to say that she had contracted RSV,’ she said. She continued: ‘They had her on a drip, they had a saline mask on her face pretty consistently.
They put tubes in her nose to kind of try and clear out the mucus. We were in there for three days and the place was full of babies with RSV and I had never heard of it before.’ When it comes to how she feels now about the ordeal, the broadcaster admitted that she wished she acted sooner before bringing Grace to her local GP.
‘You kind of think [it is a] mother’s instinct and again a real Irish [approach of] “I don’t want to be bothering anybody, there’s people much more serious than me”. When I think back on it now, she was so teeny tiny – why didn’t I react sooner? Why didn’t I act sooner? ‘It took somebody else to look into the buggy to tell me to move things along,’ she said. Kathryn added: ‘I look back at photographs of her when we were in the hospital and she’s just so tiny and with the tubes in her hands and everything.
To get a spinal lumbar puncture, I didn’t even know what that was. ‘They basically took her off me and took her away. That all probably happened in 20 minutes, but it was just the most terrifying thing because they’re so precious and it was the first time she had been away from me.
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