Archie was approaching his first birthday when he suddenly developed a fever and a “fine red rash” across his back and abdomen.
When the symptom persisted for 48 hours, his mother, Kylie Read, took him to the hospital where, three days later, Archie would take his last breath in his her arms, unrecognisably swollen and bruised.
A series of fatal errors by the medical staff has since lit a fire in the belly of the ever-grieving 36-year-old NSW mother, who was left with a four-word prompt she told 7NEWS.com.au has since saved the lives of other young children.
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Kylie and Archie arrived at the emergency department of a hospital, that cannot be named due to an ongoing legal battle, at 9.30am on Sunday, August 28, 2022, and were admitted to a bed five hours later.
The doctor’s focus, for the next 10 hours, would be getting Archie to urinate, something they told Kylie she could do with some Hydralyte at home — which she refused.
When Archie still hadn’t urinated by 8.30pm, his bloods were taken and a catheter and cannula were inserted — it prompted an emergency review and, by 5.30am on Monday, a “completely floppy” Archie was sent to the Paediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU).
There were four words Kylie said no one asked during those precious hours: “Could it be sepsis?”
“Archie had started to become agitated, and a heavy bluish rash started to appear,” Kylie said.
“They wanted to intubate and sedate him to allow his body to rest and for them to treat him. We were told the process would take about an hour, and it would be a good opportunity to get some rest.”
But 30 minutes later they woke to find Archie in cardiac arrest, surrounded by “what felt like 20 doctors and nurses around our poor little boy, trying to bring him back to life,” she said.
“I remember the nurse holding my body up, and I yelled to Archie, telling him that I was here.”
They brought him back, but he would go into cardiac arrest two more times.
“I remember sitting on the bed next to him when he went into cardiac arrest the third time and seeing blood drip from his eyes.” she said.
“By this time, our little boy was almost unrecognisable. He was so swollen and blue.”
A first and final birthday
It wasn’t until Monday that Kylie and her husband Gavin, 38, were told Archie had a common cold and a bacterial infection known as Group A streptococcus which had turned into sepsis.
Following the cardiac arrests, they were told Archie would also likely have severe brain damage if he survived.
His body had also gone into preservation mode, restricting blood to the “non-essentials” — hands, arms, feet and legs — his limbs ”turning blue and purple with the lack of blood” and which doctors said might need to be amputated.
Doctors advised “it would be in the best interest of Archie to let him go..”
“This forced my husband and me to have the worst conversation of our lives, one no parent should ever have to have,” Kylie said.
The couple requested Archie’s be kept alive until his first birthday the next day.
“At midnight, as it changed to the 23rd of August, balloons filled the room as we sang happy birthday for the first and only time to Archie, surrounded by our closest family,” Kylie said.
“My husband and I then cuddled up in Archie’s room to sleep together, one last time.
“The next morning … I held my little Archie boy while the machines were turned off, and he took his last few breaths.”
‘If I had been more educated’
An internal review of the care Archie received noted a number of areas for the hospital to improve on.
It had tried for urine output for eight hours longer than the normal practice of four hours; details had not been passed from the ED triage to doctors when Archie was admitted; and, once triggered, his emergency review took 1.5 hours too long to occur, it said.
Further investigations by senior doctors later revealed Archie “should not have died,” Kylie said, adding there were eight opportunities when it could have been recognised he was critically ill.
“Those eight opportunities, they missed them all. If it had been picked up back at the first, second or third (opportunity) then there would have been a different outcome,” she said.
“Seeing that document put in front of me, saying that if he had received appropriate care that he would still be alive, I don’t have words to describe that, it was just horrible.”
While the hospital review aims to improve outcomes among its health practitioners, Kylie said she also wishes she too knew more at the time so she could have pressed the doctors to investigate sepsis as a possible cause of Archie’s rapidly deteriorating health.
“I had never heard of sepsis,” she said. “A lot of people don’t know what it is. A lot of people think it’s an infection, but it’s not an infection, it’s the body’s reaction to infection.”
Walk for Archie ‘to spread the word’
Kylie and Gavin fell into despair after Archie’s death.
“We didn’t leave the house, we had hibernated at home, I wasn’t going to work,” Kylie said.
“When it hit a year since we lost him … I thought, I need to do something. That’s when I thought I need to spread the word about sepsis.”
That’s when Walk for Archie was born, to raise awareness about sepsis and how the extreme reaction to infection can cause the body’s immune system to destroy the body’s own tissues and organs.
Walk for Archie was established two weeks after that thought and the first walk in 2023 amassed an attendance of 150 people and raised $21,200 for Sepsis Australia.
But Kylie and Gavin didn’t truly know the impact of their mission until a woman approached Gavin at a coffee van during that event and offered to buy his coffee.
When he politely refused, Kylie said the woman told him: “No, I’m buying it for you. My son is alive because you guys told Archie’s story.”
“Her son had sepsis and was sedated, and they didn’t know whether he was going to survive, and she had read Archie’s story and she knew the questions to ask, so he survived,” Kylie said.
“He came and walked with us last year.”
The 2024 Walk for Archie starts at 8am on September 14, 2024 — starting and finishing at Speers Point Sailing Club, in Speers Point, 20km southwest of Newcastle.
Blue shirts are available to purchase emblazoned with the number 23 — Archie’s birthday — and donations for Sepsis Australia can be made at walkforarchie.au.