OAKLAND -- Tiffany Lee, 16, is the worst-case swine flu scenario every doctor fears. On July 7, she started to cough and feel dizzy. "I thought it was allergies," she says from her hospital bed.
Two days later, her parents took her to a local hospital, where doctors first said she was fine and sent her home. When she returned July 9, they said she had pneumonia and sent her in an ambulance straight to Children's Hospital Oakland, where she has spent the past 116 days.
The next three months are a blur to Tiffany, a quiet girl from Concord, Calif., with hints of a smile on her tired face.
"I couldn't breathe: I remember that a couple of times," Tiffany says. "It didn't get better."
But her father, Steve Adams, remembers every moment. "At one point her temperature hit 110. She was off the chart -- it literally didn't go that high." Her family helped ice her down, and then she slipped into a coma.
"They told us that night that she wouldn't survive. But I didn't accept it. We prayed all night in the parking lot.
"And then in the morning, she opened her eyes, and I knew she had a shot," he says.
Adams, 39, a home health care worker in Concord, lost his job because he couldn't leave his daughter. He and his wife basically moved in to her room, staying with her night and day. Another job will have to wait until Tiffany's ready to leave, he says: "This is what's important."
Three times the doctors came in to have hard discussions with the family, warning them Tiffany was near death.
"We admitted her directly to the pediatric intensive care unit," says Sharon Williams, director of Critical Care at Children's. Tiffany started with viral pneumonia and then developed a secondary infection in her lungs. Her kidneys stopped working, and she was on a ventilator to help her breathe for two months.
"First we sedated her, and then we paralyzed her. We didn't want her to try to breathe against the machine," Williams says.
Eventually Tiffany's left lung collapsed, and she went into multi-organ sepsis. The toxins from the bacteria that were attacking her body were causing cardiac problems. She was on the ventilator for 55 days and on dialysis for 53 days.
So far, hers is the worst case of H1N1 the hospital has seen. "Most of the kids with H1N1 recover and go home," Williams says.
Tiffany finally moved to a rehabilitation floor Oct. 1. Now she's excited to walk the halls using a walker, though by the end of the day, she's exhausted.
At one point her toes turned black because her circulation was so impaired, and doctors discussed amputating them. Now Tiffany wiggles them, slowly, looking down at them with an amazed expression.
"We called upon our faith," her father says. "From her brain to her toes, we prayed for her."
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