“Playing with my little sister”, was the first great wish upon leaving the hospital of Mya Martínez, a four-year-old New York girl who was hospitalized for almost two months recovering from a rare nervous disease that, according to doctors, was caused by a COVID infection-19.
The little girl was released from Blythdale Children’s Hospital on Friday after spending almost two months there recovering. “Thank you for everything,” Mya told the medical staff as she walked out. “I feel good and everyone helped me here”.
According to Pix11, It all started when at the beginning of the year her mother, Marleny Martínez, noticed that the girl was limping. “It started to get progressively worse over the days and on January 5th it started to collapse,” said the mother.
Her family immediately took her to an emergency room in the Bronx, where she began a long list of tests, including lumbar puncture and MRIs. “At one point I had to stop and say, ‘She’s four years old. Can we wait until tomorrow to do more tests? Because it was a lot”, recalled her mother, holding back tears.
Doctors finally discovered Miller Fisher syndrome, a rare nerve disease, a variant of Guillain-Barré syndrome. “What you usually see is that there is some type of prior infection, it could be many different types of infections that trigger this inflammatory response against what we call peripheral nerves,” explained Dr. Scott Klein, medical director of Blythedale Children’s Hospital in the Westchester County (NY).
Doctors believe COVID-19 was the trigger because Mya tested positive at the first hospital in the Bronx. She was treated with immunoglobulin therapy, which are antibodies for nerve disease, but that wasn’t the last stop for her. He had to do physical therapy at Blythedale for a few weeks to regain the strength to start walking again and go back to doing the normal things a four year old should do.19
Her mother plans to take Mya back to school on March 7 and said that the principal will prepare the school to accommodate her leg and other needs.