Tam-Williams immediately recognized what was wrong, admitting her patient to the hospital just in the nick of time. Tam-Williams the worm-like substance Hunter had been coughing up.ĭr. While there, Kimi mentioned the trip to the local emergency room and showed Dr. Two days later, Hunter had a follow-up visit with Dr. After a breathing treatment, he was released to go home. He told me it looked like worms.”Īt the local emergency room, Hunter filled cup after cup with phlegm, or sputum, and Kimi took photos with her phone. “His cough had come back, but this time, he was coughing something up. “Hunter acted like he was having an asthma attack at that point,” Kimi said. By Sunday morning, Hunter was out of the hospital and headed back to Neosho to continue recovering.ĭespite following doctor’s orders carefully and severely restricting his activities, a few days later, Hunter seemed to be struggling to breathe again. The next morning he was taken off the ventilator and his condition continued to get better. Tam-Williams prescribed several medications, including steroids and albuterol. Coughing, wheezing, shortness of breath, and chest tightness are all classic asthma symptoms. “It was a very scary situation.”Īsthma causes the patient’s airways to become inflamed and narrow, making breathing difficult. I suspected it was caused by a severe asthma attack,” Dr. “The CT scan showed the air surrounding Hunter’s heart and neck from the pneumomediastinum. There, Jade Tam-Williams, MD, a specialist in childhood lung diseases, met Hunter and his parents. Then Hunter was transported by ambulance from the downtown airport to the hospital, where he was admitted to the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, or PICU. Less than 30 minutes after picking Hunter up in Joplin, the jet touched down in Kansas City. “They told me what to expect all along the way.” “The crew on board the jet was amazing,” Kimi said. Kimi went with her son, while Hunter’s father, Aaron, made the three-hour drive. The team flew the hospital’s Lear jet to Joplin, taking their patient back to Kansas City. To get him there quickly, the staff at Mercy Hospital requested the Children’s Mercy Critical Care Transport team’s help. Hunter was struggling to breathe and needed a higher level of pediatric pulmonary care-care only available at the region’s premier pediatric hospital, Children’s Mercy Kansas City.
“But by 4:30 p.m., he was on a ventilator.”ĭoctors at Mercy Hospital suspected Hunter had coughed so hard he had popped a hole in his lung, resulting in what’s called a pneumomediastinum, a critical condition that leads to air escaping from the lungs, airways or the chest cavity. “Hunter walked into the hospital on his own,” Kimi said. Recognizing how serious his symptoms might be, the Neosho, Mo., family immediately took Hunter to Mercy Hospital in nearby Joplin, Mo.
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When he came out, his neck was swollen, his voice sounded different and if you touched the skin on his face or neck, it would actually make a ‘crackling sound,’” Kimi described. “While Hunter was in the shower, he coughed really hard. She never could have imagined what would happen next. Kimi, who’s a nurse, gave him some over-the-counter cold medicine and suggested he get in the shower to see if the steam might help relieve his cough. When he returned home for lunch, his cough got worse. Though he’d had a random, dry cough for the past few days, he passed with flying colors, then ran a few errands. “We were getting ready to leave for a trip to Florida the next day,” said Hunter’s mom, Kimi Box.īut first, Hunter had his school sports physical at 9 a.m. When 17-year-old Hunter Box woke up on Friday, June 28, 2019, he had a busy day ahead. Now, thanks to the Children’s Mercy Advanced Asthma Interdisciplinary Respiratory (AAIR) Clinic, Hunter’s asthma is under control.
After two hospitalizations, he was diagnosed with eosinophilic asthma and a rare complication called plastic bronchitis. In a matter of a few hours, Hunter Box went from being a healthy, active 17-year-old, to a severely ill teen struggling for his next breath.
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