Three-year-old Vivian is recovering tonight after suffering from a life threatening disease caused by COVID-19. She spent a week in the ICU battling MIS-C (miss-C), an inflammatory disease that can attack children after they recover from the virus.
The Vasey Family thought they had beaten COVID-19.
It had been a few weeks and they were all feeling great but then Vivian started to get sick again, and they couldn't figure out what was wrong.
"I walk in to her room, and she's in a ball on the floor. And she's like, 'Mommy, my legs don't work. I can't walk,'" said Miranda Vasey.
Her daughter had been feeling sick for a few days, but every doctor she talked to told her it was just a virus.
"Her hands are red, and her feet are red, and her fever is still really high. She still had the stomach ache, and she has a rash all over her body," she said.
When the fever wouldn't break, Miranda insisted on taking her to the ER. She packed a bag because she knew she wasn't leaving until she got answers for her daughter.
"There's always that mom's intuition, you need to trust your gut. And all of my mom alarms were going off...We couldn't take that it's a virus for the right answer because it wasn't the right answer," she said.
When her husband had COVID-19, he remembered reading about an inflammatory disease kids could get two-four weeks after recovering from the virus.
When they got to the ER, Miranda insisted Vivian be tested for MIS-C, Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children.
Vivian with MIS-C
"Can you imagine the kind of pain that would cause? Her stomach, her kidneys, her heart, all of her vascular system was inflamed, and if we didn't get that treatment, it would have been horrible. It would have been catastrophic for her, and it was horrible to see my child in that much pain and not know what was wrong with her," she said.
It took the infectious disease doctors about a day, but they were able to confirm Miranda's suspicions - Vivian had MIS-C and spent a week in the ICU fighting it.
"MIS-C, we only have data that goes back 10 months. From my understanding, we have only had 15,000 cases. So we don't know what the long-term effects of this will be on our child," she said.
In Georgia, there have been 83 confirmed cases of the disease according to the health department. Nationwide, there have been 20 pediatric deaths.
While the CDC classifies MIS-C as rare, the doctors treating Vivian told her family they're seeing a kid a week show up with symptoms.
"Parents need to know that kids can get really sick. You can't trust people to do the right thing, and if your child gets COVID-19, you need to have MIS-C on your radar, and you need to know that between two to four weeks later your child can get really sick," she said.
Vivian is back home today and her parents said she's back to her normal sunny self. She told her mom she wanted to thank all her fans for sharing her story.
Miranda hopes what they went through will help another family recover.