Ten-year old Crystal Gallone doesn’t know what hit her.<\/p>\n
What should have been a case of the common flu turned into a battle for life.<\/p>\n
Crystal was admitted to the RCH when her flu symptoms appeared unusually severe.\u00a0 As the flu attacked her body, her organs began shutting down and she\u00a0was sent to the\u00a0Paediatric Intensive Care Unit.\u00a0 There, she suffered a cardiac arrest.<\/p>\n
Cardiac surgeon Igor Konstantinov immediately opened Crystal’s chest to expose her heart and place it on a special heart-lung machine, known as extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), to provide circulatory support.\u00a0 Luckily for Crystal, this surgery saved her life.<\/p>\n
After four weeks in hospital, Crystal is now back home working towards a full recovery.\u00a0 She continues to visit the RCH for physiotherapy appointments and cardiology check-ups.<\/p>\n
Dr Konstantinov says it is rare for the common flu to lead to cardiac arrest, with only around\u00a0three patients presenting to the RCH from around Australia with this complication.<\/p>\n
He says Crystal is incredibly lucky to be alive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ten-year old Crystal Gallone doesn’t know what hit her. What should have been a case of the common flu turned into a battle for life. Crystal was admitted to the RCH when her flu symptoms appeared unusually severe.\u00a0 As the flu attacked her body, her organs began shutting down and she\u00a0was sent to the\u00a0Paediatric Intensive … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-the-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1039,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32\/revisions\/1039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rch.org.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}