Three-year-old Peyton Physick from Airdrie is lucky to be walking again after a life-threatening staph infection almost took her leg.
According to Alberta Health, it is normal for staph bacteria to live on the skin but an infection can be caused when it enters the skin through a cut or wound.
The Physick family was in the midst of a hospital stay in Calgary this August with Peyton's twin brother who had a staph infection on his finger, when Peyton started complaining about pain in her leg.
Peyton’s mom, Jenny Physick, had been in the hospital with her son for four days while her other five kids were at home.
“Peyton, our three year-old daughter, had fallen in the backyard and hurt her leg,” Physick said. “She kept complaining about her leg and then refused to walk on it.”
Physick initially thought it was a cry for attention with so much going on and told her daughter she was OK.
“Which made me feel really bad later,” Physick said.
Once Physick returned home with her son, she took Peyton in for X-rays to find out why she refused to walk, but they found nothing.
Their family doctor in Airdrie sent them for more X-rays, but there were no breaks or fractures. The pain and refusal to walk remained a mystery, and then after a day in bed, a high fever set in.
“So I took her right back to the Children's Hospital,” Physick said. “And then just in the triage area, the nurse took her little pants off and checked her leg. It was swollen three times the size of her usual leg.”
The nurse rushed Peyton in for a CT scan, which showed a staph infection had formed throughout her right leg.
Physick presumed the infection would be treated with IV antibiotics just like her son’s staph infection had been treated mere days prior, but that wasn’t the case.
In the middle of the night, a doctor told Physick that the infection was so bad, she didn’t know if it had spread up into Peyton’s lungs or brain.
“She told me that they'd have to do surgery immediately and that they didn't know if Peyton would be OK, if she would survive, and if that if she did survive, they didn't know if her leg would make it,” Physick said.
Peyton was rushed into surgery and Physick, whose husband had just flown north for work, sat alone in a big waiting room with no cell reception.
“That was just the worst parenting moment of my whole life,” Physick said. “I was so, so afraid. I was making all these promises to God that if he would just save her, I would do anything.”
“She went from literally just the most healthy, active three-year-old to all of a sudden she was maybe not going to make it through surgery or maybe going to lose her leg.”
After several hours, Peyton made it through surgery. She was on three different antibiotics to kill the infection and went through three more surgeries to cut the infection from her muscle and tissue.
Due to Peyton responding well to the antibiotics, she was released from the hospital after one month.
Physick praised the care they received at the Alberta Children’s Hospital in Calgary, and said they did everything to make the experience as minimally traumatic for Peyton as possible.
“We brought her home on IV antibiotics,” Physick explained. “They trained me at the hospital on how to use the pump so that I can change the IV bags at home until she's done the treatment.”
Peyton now works with an occupational therapist to regain mobility.
To her delight, Physick was told her daughter will make a full recovery while carefully continuing to monitor for returning infections.
“Once she was given the green light to put weight on her little leg, she just took off again,” Physick said. “She's fully walking now, she can even run.”
Doctors told the family that a staph infection of this degree can return to the same location.
“They think that it started from her bone and then came out to the skin,” Physick said. “That’s why we noticed the swelling and the redness on the outside of her leg.
While there was nothing they could have done to prevent it, Physick urges other parents to listen to their intuition and gut feeling when something seems off.
“They said that me bringing her in to emergency that night saved her life because the infection was so severe and we had no idea,” Physick said.
In the meantime, family and friends stepped up to help take care and feed their other five children during Peyton’s hospital stay, she added.
“We're really fortunate to have a good village that helped us with the kids and everything,” Physick said.
While there are still many follow-up appointments and blood work labs, Physick noted the community has fantastic resources in the area like home care nurses to provide support.
“You never see it coming,” Physick said of their experience. “It just came out of nowhere and we still don't know how it really happened.”
