Leokadia's Story
A little insight into Kadia’s asthma journey, I can remember when Kadia was a baby, and she always seemed to pick up some respiratory infection. Fast track to when she was in kindy, she got hospitalised with a chest infection, and two weeks after being discharged, she was hospitalised again with croup. It was around this stage Kadia was diagnosed as an asthmatic.
We were always in and out of the hospital throughout her younger years. In September 2019, we came dangerously close to losing our girl, I had picked her up from school, and she was so short of breath I had to carry her to the car. I got her to Rockingham ED; she could barely breathe by the time we arrived. They rushed her to a room, and before I knew it, she had stopped breathing. I was kicked out of her room. Drs and nurses came rushing in with oxygen tanks and wheeled her away to resus. I recall asking if she was ok, and I was told, “We are doing everything we can do, and that is the only news I can give you”. Once she was stabilised, she was rushed to PMH, and it got to the point that my family and I were regular visitors of both Rockingham hospital and PMH, now PCH.
Kadia had two subsequent life-threatening attacks, one of which required my husband to perform CPR on her as she attack in her sleep and stopped breathing. In July 2021, Kadia had the worst attack of her life. She suffered a bad episode while shopping in the city with my husband and her younger siblings. By the time my husband got her to FISH, she had lost consciousness. I can remember the phone call from my husband to get to the hospital as quickly as I could. I got a phone call from my younger daughter, and she told me what had happened, and she was scared.
I spoke with a nurse and was told to leave my car as close as possible to the entrance. I pulled up, and a man in a suit awaited me. I got taken to a little room where my husband and kids were waiting for me. When I questioned where my girl was, I was told she was in an induced coma. The care my daughter received at FISH was terrific, even their empathy for my husband and me. Kadia has always been a strong-willed girl, headstrong, physically strong, my little pocket rocket. Even in her induced coma, she was fighting to breathe alone, the staff joked that they had given her enough sedatives to knock out a few horses, but she still kept fighting the ventilator. I was told she would be in a coma for three days; five days had passed when they finally woke her. It took the entire ICU to wake her, as they knew that she would possibly need some restraining, as they gathered early on that our Kadia is a fighter.
After they woke her, she spent another day at FISH ICU, and then we were transferred to PCH, where we spent ten days. Kadia has been blessed with fantastic care at PCH, and one man in particular that is so invested in the health of Kadia, Dr Le Souef. Early on, he gave me his mobile number in case of any emergencies. When Kadia was given the clear to come home, he called the next day after she was discharged.
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Kadia is an avid rugby player. She has been playing since she was six years old. It was difficult for her because her diminished lung function and countless hospital stays would impact her, especially as she got older and took the sport more seriously. But the remarkable thing about my girl, and what I admire the most, is she never allowed it to hold her back, and she never used it as an excuse not to be able to play. If anything, I think it fuelled her passion to work harder.
