Allen, now 28, shared her experience with Live Science.
That weekend, I started to feel a little sick, but nothing too bad. My mom kept giving me over-the-counter medicine and it would work for a bit, then once it wore off, it would get really bad. I'd planned to go to one of my friend's birthday parties then spend the night with my best friend. I went to the party, but I texted my mom saying I should come home because I really wasn't feeling well, which was not usual for me at all. That night I asked my mom to sleep with me because I just felt terrible.
We were waiting for my pediatrician to open up and my mom suggested taking a shower, saying, "Maybe that will help you feel a bit better before we go to the doctor." She had to help me take a shower because I was so weak, I couldn't stand by myself. She stepped away for a second just to grab a towel and said that when she came back, my lips were turning gray and my eyes were starting to look sunken in. She knew that something was not right so she called my dad, who was at the grocery store, and told him to just leave everything, that we need to get to the hospital.
Allen was put on life support and had to be intubated for five weeks after getting sick with flu. (Image credit: Madi Allen)My dad rode with me in the ambulance while my mom went home and grabbed a few things — she thought we'd just be there for a few days. By the time we got to the second hospital, I was in respiratory distress. They wanted to intubate me straight away but were waiting until my mom got there so she could talk to me — my dad did the best he could, but my dad didn't know how to calm me down.
Finally my mom tried to calm me down and she's like, "They're gonna have to put you to sleep now." I remember her telling me, "You're just gonna go to sleep for like a couple of hours and then you're gonna wake up and you're gonna feel a lot better."
After I was intubated, things got worse. I had to be put on life support so needed to be moved to a bigger hospital in St. Louis, Missouri. The flight team came to evaluate me and they later told me they didn't think they were ever going to get me to Saint Louis. They thought I wasn't going to make the trip. But they said my mom was begging them to help me, everyone in my family was begging them, so they did everything they could to get me on the helicopter. They worked on me for several hours — every time they tried to move me something would go wrong — but eventually they got me there.
After getting out of hospital, it took years for Allen to recover, eventually having part of her lung removed that had been badly damaged by the virus. (Image credit: Madi Allen)
I woke up five weeks later, and it was very confusing. Everybody was told if I asked what day it was, just to tell me the day of the week. When someone accidentally told me the date, I started crying because my aunt was supposed to be getting married a few weeks later and I was worried about being at her wedding. My mom wasn't there, so my dad had to calm me down and then he told me the wedding had been pushed to October so I could be there.
That summer, I didn't really do anything besides go to doctor's appointments. I was doing physical therapy, occupational therapy and speech therapy — literally all my time was spent at the hospital in therapy. I'd missed three months of school, but I got to start eighth grade with all my friends, and I ended up playing basketball again. But the next several years was a lot of hard work of trying to get back to my normal.
During COVID, when I was 22, I kept getting sick, and the doctors finally told me that part of my lung was so damaged from the flu it was causing infections, so they gave me an option of getting part of my lung removed. It was a major surgery, but I did it and that was probably the best decision I ever made, because it's been five years and I have not been in the hospital once.
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When people hear my story, they don't realize that if I don't tell the end — after the hospital until now — they don't realize that my life didn't go back to normal after. It's taken 10 years. And it's hard. Some of the other family members that we've gotten to know through Families Fighting Flu, it's difficult listening to their stories. Sometimes I feel like I have this survivor's guilt. Their stories sound exactly like mine — but their kids didn't make it.
With thanks to Families Fighting Flu, a non-profit organization that promotes flu vaccination and raises awareness of the severity of the infectious disease through families that have been affected.
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