BUFFALO, N.Y. (WKBW) — In the last two months more than 750 children have been admitted to Oishei Children’s Hospital with RSV. That's more than double the number of patients admitted with RSV during the entire 2019 to 2020 respiratory illness season. In total more than 1,500 children have tested positive for the virus. It's an outcome mom of five Carmen Bremiller now knows all too well.
The Bremiller household was filled with lots of laughter and smiles. Five little girls make this home complete.
"It's never boring here," said Carmen Bremiller. "There's always something going on."
However, this past October was unlike anything they've ever experienced before.
"They weren’t eating, barley drinking, said Bremiller. "They were sick for about two weeks. So I took them into urgent care and I had them check out for RSV, Flu and COVID. It came back that my three youngest had RSV."
Bremiller said while two of her children seemed to get better, her youngest daughter Kinsley only got worse. Bremiller took the one year old back to the doctor for more tests and said that's when things took a turn for the worse.
"She ended up on full oxygen and it still was barley coming up," said Bremiller. "So that's when they sent us by ambulance to Children’s."
Bremiller said her daughter was put on a ventilator in the ICU for 2.5 weeks and had to be away from their home majority of the time as well.
"She was on breathing treatments every four hours through the ventilator," said Bremiller. "She ended up getting a blood clot while she was there, so that had to be treated. She had a blood transfusion and she had a bronchoscopy."
Bremiller said she heard about RSV before. She told 7 News her sisters children had mild cases and recovered quickly. Bremiller said she never expected a case to be this bad and never thought it would happen to her children.
"It was terrifying, you know," said Bremiller. "Nothing could have really prepared us to go through that and watch her go through that."
The Bremiller family isn't alone. Dr. Steven Turkovich, Chief Medical Officer at Oishei Children’s Hospital, said RSV cases are on the rise here in Western New York.
"Since Halloween we've had 140 kids test positive for the flu" said Turkovich. "We've had 230 kids test positive for RSV and those numbers are both going up. Both of those are causing a significant number of admissions to the hospital, overwhelming pediatric ICU and our floors. We've opened up 43 additional beds for med surge patients which is equivalent to about two new floors worth of patients. And we still have patients waiting in emergency rooms waiting for beds because we still don't have enough."
Bremiller said Kinsley has recovered enough to return home but a long road to recovery is still ahead.
"It's really nerve wrecking," said Bremiller. "I do get kind of nervous. Any little noise she makes that isn't normal, I'm like checking on her all paranoid but she's been doing pretty good so far."
Bremiller told 7 News she's happy their family can be back together again.
"I was like so happy you know because she's able to be home and her sisters are happy she's home," said Bremiller.
You can find a link to the Donations for Kinsley GoFundMe Page here.
You can find more information on RSV on the CDC website here.
