Boy's arms, legs amputated due to rare COVID condition

A ten-year-old boy in the US underwent four amputations after developing a rare, serious condition linked to the coronavirus.

Dae-Shun Jamison, a resident of Michigan, was suffering from Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children and had both of his hands and his left leg amputated this week. His right leg was amputated earlier in February.

“They told me that he had MIS-C and I didn’t understand what it was. I’ve never heard of this, didn’t have a clue about it,” Dae-Shun’s mother Brittney Autman said.

“We see it happen in children that are otherwise healthy, so it does make it very challenging,” Dr. Rosemary Olivero, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital, said.

Doctors are trying to figure out more about MIS-C because the illness is new like COVID-19.

“The general way it’s going to go (is) you have the (coronavirus) infection, mild or not, you recover and then you develop this new illness that looks very different from an acute respiratory COVID,” Olivero said.

The boy’s entire family contracted coronavirus a few months ago. He was asymptomatic, but his mother noticed about two weeks later that he wasn’t OK.

“I noticed he started laying around. He said he had a headache and then the day before I took him in, the day I took him in, he had a high fever,” Autman said.

“The rule of thumb that we all keep going back to is that children are fine, children are fine and indeed children still have a much lower risk of having severe, acute respiratory COVID-19. That is still the case,” Olivero said. “However, MIS-C shows us one of the many rare, strange manifestations that coronavirus can cause that can make an individual very ill.”

Doctors warn parents to look for signs of MIS-C after their kids test positive for the virus: fever, abdominal pain, vomiting, diarrhea, neck pain, rash, bloodshot eyes and fatigue.

“I’m trying to find ways to get him back to the way he was as much as possible,” his mother said.

After recovering from Monday’s surgery, there will be more rehab, similar to the work Dae-Shun has already been doing at Mary Free Bed Rehabilitation Hospital in Grand Rapids.

Michigan has reported fewer than 80 cases of MIS-C to date while fewer than five children have died of the illness.