I Thought My 2-Year-Old Daughter Had A Cold–She Ended Up Losing Her Legs

Kory Paige Loden is a mom-of-three from Tennessee. Two-and-a-half years ago, her daughter Mady fell ill with what seemed like the flu at first. Yet within 24 hours, Mady was fighting for her life with doctors fearing the worst.

When I look back on everything that happened, I'm always struck by how it seemed to come out of nowhere. Mady was about 18-months-old and went to bed totally fine one Monday night. It was October of 2023 and she was this happy, smiley, little girl.

When she woke up the next day, Mady was clearly not feeling well though. At that stage, she was a little lethargic, but still eating and drinking. Her older brother had tested positive for Flu B the Friday before, so I assumed that’s what she had. But as the day progressed, she got even more lethargic and stopped eating and drinking. Then as the evening closed in she got feverish and her feet and lips started turning blue.

I had talked to my pediatrician sister-in-law and she mentioned that sometimes babies’ feet will turn blue when they are feverish. So when I noticed the feet, I stuck her in the shower, which always made her feel better. But she just laid down on the shower floor, which was not like her. I got her out after a few minutes. Almost as soon as I did, I noticed her skin started to mottle on her torso. That was when I knew something was wrong.

I immediately took her to an urgent care facility nearby. They saw her in triage and immediately called the ambulance to come get her and take her to our local hospital.

No one was telling me what was going on at this stage. I rode up front with Mady in the ambulance and asked if Mady was going to be okay. They had tried to get an IV started when she was in the ambulance, before we pulled out of convenient care, and Mady didn’t react at all. The EMT told me it wasn’t "looking good" just based on that.

That whole night is honestly a blur. Like a fever dream. I felt like I was watching it happen to someone else. Thankfully the doctors and nurses acted so quickly.

Eventually Mady was stabilized enough to be lifeflighted to a children's hospital 90 minutes from where we were. Even then, I don’t think I fully understood how serious it was until my husband and I were on the way to the children’s hospital. That was when they called and asked for verbal permission to perform a “code” to restart her heart if she suffered cardiac or respiratory arrest.

When we got there, we had to sit outside her room until they were able to get her stable. Honestly, stable was a relative term for where she was. They told us when we got there that they might have to put her on life support and were asking for our permission to do it.

I can still remember the doctor telling me: “We aren’t there yet, I just want you to know about what it may come to.” 10 minutes later she came back and said it was time to put her on life support. It was a last resort to save her life.

The doctors told us the next 24 to 48 hours would be critical. It was incredibly overwhelming. Thankfully I had my husband and my church was coordinating taking care of my boys at home, so that was one less thing I had to worry about.

My family also flew into the area immediately and were there within the first 24 hours. The thing that held me and my husband together though was my faith. We are both Christians, and we have always been, but neither of us have experienced any sort of trial. When we went through it, we had a weird peace about it all. Not like we were happy about it happening, but we were confident that the Lord’s will would be done.

I distinctly remember sitting in a room with just my husband and I and cardiologist came in and told us Mady had had to undergo heart surgery. She underwent several life-saving procedures during those first 48 hours. It wasn't looking good. All the doctors would say is "she is really sick."

When we got that update, I remember both my husband and I praying that if Mady was going to pass that he would take her quickly and painlessly.

The first day in the children's hospital, the doctors had to poke a hole in Mady's heart because it was inflating as a result of the life support machine. When they did that, they discovered she had an interrupted inferior vena cava (IVC) in her heart, where the main vein carrying blood from the lower body to the heart does not form completely.

The cardiologist told us that almost every time an Interrupted IVC is connected with spleen issues. That’s how we found out that she was born without a spleen. Without a spleen, her body just doesn’t handle encapsulated bacteria like it should, so it got into her blood stream and caused sepsis.

For a long time I didn't know it was sepsis. The doctors knew but they rarely used the word "sepsis" around us. Maybe they were protecting us or maybe I was just too in shock to take it in. If you Google something like sepsis, it can really send you down a rabbit hole though. Thankfully I didn't do that.

Mady's situation was made worse by the fact the sepsis had triggered disseminated intravascular coagulation. It's when your blood starts clotting everywhere it shouldn't. You can run out of the ability to clot where you actually need it.

After Mady got through the first 24 hours and then 48 hours without further incident, we began to breathe a little. It took them several days to figure out what had caused her illness. Doctors ultimately determined the sepsis had been caused by strep pneumonia. Strep pneumonia is the most common cause of ear infections, but most people have no problem getting over it. Your spleen helps you fight encapsulated bacteria. But when you don't have that, it just wreaks havoc on your body.

Though she was still alive, Mady was experiencing kidney failure while her limbs were growing darker and darker. By then we knew there was a possibility she would lose her legs.

The doctors tried for a long time to get blood flow back to her limbs. There was even talk of sending her to the hyperbaric chamber at the adult hospital across the street to try to get blood back. We didn’t end up trying that because the risk of moving her while she was on life support wasn’t worth it.

Mady had one of her legs amputated in early December. We had been at the Children's hospital for almost two months at that point. She underwent multiple surgeries while in hospital and her treatment continued for months after we were discharged.

A few months after she was discharged, her remaining leg was amputated. They tried to save her heel but they couldn’t save her achilles tendon and an amputation made the most sense.

It's two-and-a-half years since everything happened and the good news is that Mady is back to being a happy, smiley, little girl. She's living her best life as a bilateral amputee. Thankfully, she was so little when everything happened, I don't think she really remembers what her life was like before.

She can move around great either with her prosthesis or without. She's really quick. I share her story and will continue to do so in the hope it might help another parent one day. Mady had had sepsis without a fever which was kind of weird and everything that happened to her came out of nowhere.

The earlier you catch sepsis, the better the odds are. We caught hers right before it was too late. Others might not be so lucky.

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This story was originally published May 25, 2026 at 11:19 AM.