A 4-year-old West Texas girl who developed secondary pneumonia following a measles infection spent over four days in a hospital before she was given budesonide, a steroid used to relieve inflammation affecting the airways.
Budesonide is one of the treatments Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has promoted during the Texas measles outbreak, according to The Hill.
Lyla was admitted to the emergency room of Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock on Feb. 28 due to breathing difficulty.
Two days earlier at the same hospital, a 6-year-old girl who also had pneumonia following a measles infection died. The deceased child did not receive budesonide or any similar breathing treatment before her death. The hospital also administered the wrong antibiotic for the 6-year-old’s community-acquired pneumonia, according to experts who reviewed the medical records.
According to Lyla’s mother, MaryAnn, budesonide helped Lyla make a strong and fast turnaround from her illness. Within hours of receiving the treatment, Lyla was “starting to walk around. She’s eating, she’s talking, she’s acting more and more like herself, and we’re just like, ‘whoa,’” MaryAnn said.
Within 36 hours of Lyla’s first budesonide treatment on March 3 in Covenant Children’s Hospital’s intensive care unit (ICU), she was released straight to home.
‘She’s too bad. I think you need to go to the ER’
In an interview with The Defender, MaryAnn and her husband, Henry, shared their experiences in the days leading up to Lyla’s successful treatment with budesonide.
The couple said they were vaccinated against measles as children. But they chose not to vaccinate their kids because they knew several people who were injured by childhood vaccines.
“We have 12 children alone in this community here amongst Mennonites that are autistic because of the vaccines,” MaryAnn said. “They were totally normal babies.”
Lyla is the youngest of MaryAnn and Henry’s four children. All four broke out with the measles rash within days of each other, MaryAnn said.
MaryAnn gave them natural products to support their recovery. “We have a health food store here in town called Health-2-U,” she said, “so I was using all their natural products. It was working great on all my kids.”
MaryAnn, who broke out with what she called a “lighter version” of measles even though she was vaccinated, said, “My son Brandon … fought it so good. He pretty much just slept it off.”
She continued:
“Then the most interesting thing happened. My daughter, Lyla, was totally free from the measles, feeling better. She all of a sudden starts having some respiratory issues.
“I started noticing she wasn’t breathing as well, but she was breathing very heavy on her chest and her fever was coming back. And I was like, that’s weird. We’re over the measles now. Why is this happening?”
MaryAnn and Henry decided to take Lyla to a doctor. On Feb. 28, they drove Lyla to a clinic 30 minutes away, just across the New Mexico state line. The clinic staff “tested her oxygen and it was at 85%,” MaryAnn said.
A normal blood oxygen level is between 95%-100% for most people, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
The clinic’s nurse practitioner, who assessed Lyla, said she didn’t feel comfortable treating Lyla at the clinic with an IV. “I don’t think it’ll do enough. She’s too bad. I think you need to go to the ER,” she said.
The nurse practitioner told MaryAnn and Henry to take Lyla to a nearby hospital in New Mexico, which they did.
Hospital staff deny request for food and water
When they arrived at the hospital, only Henry went inside with Lyla. MaryAnn stayed in the car out of concern that her light measles rash might negatively affect the treatment they would receive.
Inside, the hospital staff hooked Lyla up to oxygen and questioned Henry about her medical history and situation.
Over the next nine hours of Lyla’s stay there, Henry and MaryAnne grew unhappy with the treatment they and Lyla received.
For instance, Henry told of an unfortunate exchange he had with the head nurse when he explained that Lyla was having breathing difficulty following a measles infection. “I got about halfway through when she interrupted and said, ‘Are you a doctor?’ in a rather condescending way.”
Henry said, “No, ma’am, I’m not.”
The nurse responded, “Then where’s your proof that she had the measles?” Henry offered to show her photos of his four children, including Lyla, when they had the measles rash.
About four hours into her stay at the hospital, Lyla grew thirsty and hungry. But the staff wouldn’t give her water or food, despite Henry’s requests.
When Henry asked the head nurse about this, “her response was something like, ‘if she crashes on me, she’s going to projectile vomit,’” Henry said.
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‘I trusted you with my life 12 years ago, and I trust you with my daughter’s life now’
MaryAnn was communicating with Henry via phone from the car about the treatment he and Lyla were receiving. “Finally, I contacted my doctor from Lubbock,” she said.
She explained that 12 years ago, she almost died from a blood clot due to a stroke, but a doctor at Covenant Medical Center fought to save her life. “I had a 3% chance of survival with that blood clot,” she said.
With the doctor’s help, MaryAnn survived. The two have stayed in touch since.
So MaryAnn texted him about what was happening with Lyla and Henry. “We’re not getting treated kindly,” she told him. “We’re hoping we can come to Lubbock.”
The doctor responded, “We need to get her in a chopper. She needs to come to Lubbock Covenant Children’s Hospital. I will make sure you guys get taken care of here.”
MaryAnn told him, “I trusted you with my life 12 years ago, and I trust you with my daughter’s life now. Please help us.”
MaryAnn’s former doctor contacted the ER doctor on shift at Lubbock Covenant Children’s Hospital.
According to MaryAnn, her former doctor called her and said, “She’s on call right now. I put in a good word for y’all and she’s going to take care of your daughter as soon as y’all get there … Y’all will be in good hands.”
MaryAnn said she felt peace at that moment.
Up until then, she’d been very scared. “I mean, my daughter’s in the hospital and I’m sitting outside the vehicle. She can’t drink, she can’t eat nothing, and she’s crying.”
Lyla gets airlifted to Lubbock hospital
The chopper arrived to carry Lyla to the Lubbock hospital. Henry recalled:
“So Lyla — having begged me for something to eat and drink for nine solid hours now without success — she looked at a complete stranger wearing a helmet and a mask and all suited up for the helicopter and said, ‘I’m hungry.’”
The pilot said to her, “Well, what would you like?” She said, “I want chocolate cereal and milk — white milk.”
“Well, I will make sure when we get where we’re going that that’s the first thing you get,” the pilot said.
And he did, Henry said. “We weren’t in the ER for five minutes when he was unstrapping her and all that, and the nurse and the doctor came in, and he said, ‘Hey, ladies, I promised this little girl something. She wants cereal and milk.’”
The nurse said, “We don’t have that here, but I know a place next door that does. I’ll go grab some.”
“Fifteen minutes later, Lyla was eating a bowl of cereal and drinking her milk,” Henry said.
Henry asked the ER doctor, “Is there any medical reason that this child shouldn’t eat or drink?”
According to Henry, the doctor said, “No. Why would we deny this child anything? She needs to eat and drink as much as she wants to get better.”
Dr. Richard Bartlett persuades Lyla’s doctor to give her budesonide
Later, Lyla was transferred from the ER to the ICU.
Henry spoke highly of the Lubbock hospital staff. “The nurses were great, the doctor was nice. No complaints about the staff there in terms of how they treated us.”
They gave Lyla what they called “broad-spectrum antibiotics” and then did testing to narrow down which kind of antibiotic she most needed, he said.
Meanwhile, they gave her oxygen. As her stay went on, Lyla needed less oxygen, “so that was a good improvement,” Henry said.
On Lyla’s fourth day in the Lubbock hospital, MaryAnn managed to relay a message to Dr. Richard Bartlett, asking him to come speak with Lyla’s doctor about giving her breathing treatments with nebulized budesonide.
Bartlett, a West Texas emergency room physician with over 30 years of experience, successfully used budesonide during the COVID-19 pandemic to help patients with respiratory inflammation. His website, Budesonide Works, highlights numerous studies and reports that show the steroid’s effectiveness in easing respiratory inflammation.
“I had talked to Dr. Ben Edwards a couple of days before already, and telling him all about Lyla on the phone,” MaryAnn said. Edwards, together with the people at Health-2-U, contacted Bartlett and asked him to speak with the Lubbock hospital doctors.
In an earlier interview with The Defender, Bartlett described budesonide as “a generic, widely available inhaled corticosteroid with long-term safety data.”
According to MaryAnn, Bartlett told Lyla’s doctor, “Hey, we’re so thankful for what y’all are doing here. Y’all are doing an amazing job, but I have this budesonide. I’ve never lost anyone with COVID … Can we try it on this patient?”
Lyla’s doctor said they had never used it before but that they could try it.
MaryAnn said she and Henry waited for Bartlett to request budesonide — rather than asking themselves — because they knew others who had requested it and been denied, including another Mennonite family whose 2-year-old was hospitalized just down the hall from Lyla.
The doctors gave Lyla her first budesonide treatment that morning and another treatment that evening.
The next morning, on March 4, they gave her a third treatment. By 3:30 p.m., “we get to go home,” MaryAnn said. “That’s how fast her oxygen” levels rose.
“We were sent home with an antibiotic syrup … It was amoxicillin to be specific,” Henry said.
Since Lyla had already been on antibiotics during her five days at the hospital, the hospital staff just instructed Lyla to be on them for two more days to complete the seven-day regime.
“Then that was it,” Henry said. After Lyla completed her antibiotics, she “was good to go.”
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State’s only recommendation for measles: MMR vaccine
Two days after she was released from the hospital, Henry and MaryAnn brought Lyla for a follow-up visit to Edwards, who confirmed that she had returned to health.
Lyla is now “back to herself — fighting with her siblings and doing all the things that we never knew we would be happy to see her do,” Henry said. “But yeah, she’s great.”
As The Defender previously reported, Edwards attempted to get the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) to issue a statement on budesonide as a possible treatment for respiratory issues following a measles infection.
On March 2, Edwards spoke about the treatment with Dr. Scott Milton, the DSHS Public Health Region 1 medical director whom Edwards was told was part of the “incident command staff.”
Milton told Edwards that the state’s only recommendation for measles was the measles-mumps-rubella or MMR vaccine.
Milton “did not think that was going to be possible” for Texas DSHS to promote budesonide, Edwards said. “I asked why not and his reply was basically that he did not think the health authorities higher up in the chain of command would ‘go for that.’”
Related articles in The Defender- Texas Health Officials Reject Doctor’s Plea to Recommend Measles Treatment
- ‘Medical Error’ Led to Death of 6-Year-Old Who Developed Pneumonia After Measles Diagnosis
- Exclusive: ‘Just Normal Doctoring’ — a Texas Doctor’s Eyewitness Report on Measles Outbreak
- CHD.TV Exclusive: Parents of Child Who Died During Texas Measles Outbreak Speak Out
