Stephanie Merrell’s voice catches as she thinks about the 8-year-old girl.
The third-grader had a history of knee pain. In fact, she’d already had two surgeries on it in the past year. So when she walked into the school nurse’s office with her father that morning, the crutches made sense.
Her dad told Merrell his daughter had a flare-up over the weekend, so they took her to a free-standing urgent care facility. Their diagnosis: bursitis. Alarms bells went off immediately in Merrell’s mind.
As a member of the MUSC Health’s school-based telehealth team, the licensed practical nurse has seen her share of kids’ ailments, but she had to admit, this was a new one to her.
“You don’t usually see many 8-year-olds with bursitis,” Merrell said.
Just to be safe, Merrell took the child’s temperature, which was elevated. A routine exam by a school-based health provider on a particularly angry, swollen part of her knee was enough for them to know this diagnosis was off. So they made a call and sent the girl and her father to the MUSC Children’s Hospital Emergency Department. Once there, a few basic tests confirmed the team's instincts: It wasn’t bursitis. It was way worse. It was sepsis.
“The doctors said if she had gone, maybe, another day without getting seen, she could have died,” Merrell said.
