6-Year-Old Suffers Hours-Long Seizures, Nearly Dies After Developing Tick-Borne Illness on Family Hike
Aiden Debusk went on a hike with his brother and father, only to return covered in ticks, which led him to develop a tick-borne illness
Courtesy of Laiken Debusk
Earlier this summer, 6-year-old Aiden Debusk and his 3-year-old brother Anakin took a hike with their father Steven Debusk, and returned home with several ticks all over their bodies.
"[My husband said], 'There were a lot of ticks,' " Aiden's mom Laiken Debusk told Today in a recent interview. "I start checking the boys, and I pull one from the nape of Aiden's neck and then one off his underwear line, and then I pulled six or seven off Anakin."
Despite removing the bugs, Aiden was still feeling strange. He complained of headaches that didn't seem to go away and refused to eat, causing his parents to realize that something was really wrong.
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He was taken to a local hospital where doctors were unsure what was wrong with Aiden. They noticed that his white blood cell count was low, and he needed blood and platelet transfusion. Doctors tested Aiden for tick-borne illnesses after Steven had mentioned the tick bites, however, these results can take a long time and Aiden's bites had already healed.
Aiden was subsequently transferred to Arkansas Children's Hospital. Once there, he began to rapidly deteriorate. "When we first got here, he was going to the bathroom on himself," Laiken told the outlet. "He couldn't walk and didn't really know his name."
He then went into early-stage organ failure and began experiencing neurological symptoms. "[It] turned into a two-and-a-half-hour seizure that they could only [stop] by intubating him and putting him in a medically induced coma," Laiken revealed.
Courtesy of Laiken Debusk
"They waited two days, and they were trying to pull him out of the [coma] again, and when they did, he started having another seizure that actually ended up lasting six and a half hours."
Eventually, the doctors discovered that Aiden had a tick-borne illness called ehrlichiosis which he experienced a bad reaction to. Ehrlichiosis is an infection caused by certain bacteria carried by backlegged ticks and lone star ticks.
Aiden was then put on the antibiotic doxycycline, but his infection led him to develop a condition called central nervous system hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis, an overreaction of the immune system, which had been causing the seizure.
Courtesy of Laiken Debusk
"It's like your whole brain gets really angry and goes haywire," Laiken said of the disease. Although it remains unclear if Aiden will have permanent damage from the seizures, he's finally out of the medically induced coma. An MRI image of his brain showed that it has "shrunk," but it's too soon to know what that entails. Aiden has also not spoken much.
"I heard him say, 'I need,' today but that's all I could make out," his mom told Today. "He'll start off kind of strong but then he peters out a bit."
After experiencing this tragedy, Laiken wants to make sure that others know the dangers of ticks. "Make sure you do check if there are ticks," she said. "I'm not telling everybody to keep [their] kids in and never let them out anymore. But make sure you're using the bug spray."
"Make sure they're wearing pants. Make sure you change their clothes."
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