The “cold” was persistent, and Leon woke up at 5 am one morning with a very high fever and a headache. "He wasn't acting like himself," Theresa remembers, so she and Skip decided to take him to the doctor as soon as the office opened. Only two hours later, Leon, sleeping on his mother's lap, was unresponsive. Theresa and Skip quickly moved him to the couch and opened his eyes, but the youngster was not responding to light – then started convulsing. They immediately called paramedics, but with snowy conditions and the location of their home, they needed to wait a half-hour for the ambulance to arrive. Once Leon was in the ambulance and on his way to the local hospital, his parents followed the emergency vehicle in their truck. “I didn’t have a coat or my purse, and Skip was in his PJ’s,” Theresa remembers. “The roads were snowy, and we had to pull over often.” At their local hospital, Leon continued to seize. Theresa says at one point, there were probably 12 doctors, nurses and emergency medical technicians (EMTs) around her young son, all trying to help. “I remember hearing a page for all available doctors to come to the emergency room,” she says. “Then there were four people on either side of him, plus two near his head and two near his feet.” At first, there seemed to be no real conclusions but many possibilities. Theresa and Skip were told that they may want to call their preacher and alert family. There wasn’t going to be any news that was great, Theresa says, but – after a number of considerations – doctors determined that Leon’s condition was treatable. He would need to be immediately transferred to Geisinger’s Janet Weis Children’s Hospital in Danville for treatment. “At that point, any plans for that day stopped,” Theresa says, noting that they were fortunate to have relatives who lived close by and were able to care for Leon’s older sister, Cheyenne, who already had gone to school for the day. Life Flight was called to transport Leon to Janet Weis Children’s Hospital. He was immediately admitted to the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU), where a brain abscess was found to be the source of his problems. “It’s a very uncommon problem, says Michael Ryan, DO, infectious disease specialist at Janet Weis Children’s Hospital. “We really only see one or two cases of this each year.” Without proper diagnosis and treatment, he adds, the abscess can lead to severe brain damage – or even death. Theresa was determined to understand exactly what the situation was and how the problem could be fixed, Dr. Ryan remembers. She knew Leon would need surgery to eliminate the abscess and asked a number of questions, making sure she completely understood the answers. “All pediatricians and parents need to be advocates for our kids,” Dr. Ryan says, “and as a mother, she was a great example of this.” With questions answered, Theresa and Skip waited while their son underwent brain surgery, one day after he was admitted to Janet Weis Children’s Hospital. Leon seemed to initially do well after the first surgery, when the abscess was drained. But then, Theresa says, Leon started hallucinating. He was seeing bugs and spiders around him, and became increasingly sick. “A few days after that first surgery, his temperature rose,” Dr. Ryan says. “That’s when we found out through a CT scan that the abscess was back, but in a different place.” Leon was suffering from an extremely aggressive bacterial infection, and it was one he wouldn’t be able to recover from on his own. He required another, more aggressive surgery. Theresa and Skip waited nervously as an hour went by, then more than an hour went by. “There’s the worry of stroke, of heart attack, of seizures,” Theresa says. Plus, there was the possibility that doctors would not be able to remove the infection completely and that it would return yet again. “You just have to believe everything will be fine,” she says. Finally, they received word that the surgery did, indeed, go well. Leon was very weak afterward, and he required a lengthy course of antibiotics – but several CT scans later, there still was no sign of another abscess. Today, Leon is doing well. He is a happy and healthy 5-year-old, and his parents are grateful that Janet Weis Children’s Hospital, with help from Children’s Miracle Network donations, had the necessary resources to save their son. “He couldn’t have gotten through this without the technology and skill that were there,” Theresa says. “You don’t know what you’ll need until you’re faced with needing it – and then you hope it’s there.” | 
