Baby revived on side of Md. interstate after seizure is home and doing well
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Version 0 of 1. Kenzlee Mae Cushman — the 9-month-old girl who was revived by a police officer on the side of an interstate in Maryland four days ago — is home and doing well. “Nothing happened to her, it seemed like. That’s how she acted,” her mother, Jessica Kane, said Wednesday evening from their home in West Virginia. “She was happy and fine all day,” Kane said. When Kenzlee Mae arrived home Tuesday, she crawled around and polished off some applesauce-berry baby food. Her family also returned to its routine. Her maternal grandmother came over to care Wednesday for her while her parents were at work. That’s quite a sedate shift from their dramatic Sunday afternoon. While riding with family through Maryland on Interstate 270, Kenzlee Mae — who six months earlier had undergone open-heart surgery — suffered a seizure in her car seat. The driver pulled the car over as the family tried to tend to her. In front of them, by chance, was a Montgomery County police officer, Jim Herman, who had just pulled over a driver for speeding. Herman switched his attention and soon was giving the child chest compressions. [Police officer didn’t expect he’d help save a baby during a traffic stop] “She’s a tough little girl,” Kane said. “She’s our trouper.” In an interview, one of the physicians who treated Kenzlee Mae offered his insights into what happened and what remains unknown. From the interstate, Kenzlee Mae was taken by ambulance to Shady Grove Medical Center, where she stayed for about four hours before being transported to the pediatric intensive-care unit at Ruby Memorial Hospital in Morgantown, W.Va. During that time, her heart monitoring showed as normal, according to Charles Mullett, a critical-care pediatrician who treated Kenzlee Mae at Ruby Memorial and talked about her care with the permission of her parents. Mullett’s first impression of his patient: a happy, alert child sitting upright on her mother’s lap. Kenzlee Mae smiled and tracked the adults moving around her with her eyes. “Cutest kid in the PICU,” he said. The girl’s smiling disposition was an encouraging sign medically. “She is very high-energy for her age. Totally socially interested,” Mullett said. “That requires all your neurons to be talking to each other.” He and his colleagues checked for brain damage that could have resulted if her heart had stopped. Flat metal sensors were attached to Kenzlee Mae’s head for 45 minutes to measure brain waves. All clear. Kenzlee Mae had spent time at Ruby Memorial before. She was born with two heart problems: a hole between the two pumping chambers and a valve that was too tight, Mullett said. A surgeon patched the hole and loosened the valve, according to Mullett. The operation greatly reduced a murmur in her heart. On Monday, Mullett and his colleagues tried to learn what had caused the seizure. One big concern was that something about her heart had triggered it. But the girl’s electrocardiogram and other tests were normal. “Her heart checked out A-okay,” Mullett said. Perhaps it was a febrile seizure, relatively common in children, which can be induced by a fever. Kenzlee Mae had a fever of 101 degrees at Shady Grove. Another possibility is that she has a chronic seizure condition. She is set to have more brain tests, principally a video electroencephalogram that lasts 12 to 24 hours. “We really don’t know what caused the seizure,” Mullett said Tuesday. “The best thing to root for is probably the febrile seizure.” Doctors wrote a prescription for medication that can be given to Kenzlee Mae if she has another seizure. But after Sunday, the medication isn’t enough to relieve her mother’s worry. Kane said she is such a sound sleeper that she frets the baby could have a seizure in the middle of the night in her crib and she might not know it. “I’m terrified this is going to happen again,” Kane said. “She’s sleeping with me from now on.” |