This story doesn’t start with a 3-year-old on a Power Wheels toy. It starts before that. About six months before with a decision.
“Well it wasn’t an easy decision,” Kayla Love said. “It was definitely hard.”
Love remembers getting that phone call from her son Alexander’s daycare saying he had a fever of 101.
At the doctor’s office, all tests came back negative, but Love says her son wasn’t himself. He wasn’t playing or eating.
The doctor said to wait three days to see if there’s an improvement. Alexander got worse on day two.
“He turned blue in our home and I had to do CPR and we took him,” she broke off starting to cry. “[We] rushed him to the hospital and they life-flighted him to Nationwide Children’s.”
A night at Nationwide Children’s Hospital turned to three months because in February Alexander’s limbs started turning black.
“They had to rush him into emergency surgery,” Love said.
On February 4, surgeons amputated both of Alexander’s legs and one of his arms. In three days, the other arm was taken.
“The strep traveled through his bloodstream and shut down all of his organs,” Love said.
It’s what makes a 3-year-old on a Power Wheel more meaningful. Adaptive Sports Connection is an organization that empowers people with physical and cognitive challenges through sports and therapeutic outdoor recreation.
An extension of that, Go Baby Go, offers children with significant mobility impairment a means to explore.
Midwestern Auto Group sponsored the gift: a Maserati Levante. Alexander’s father controls direction while Alexander controls stop-and-go thanks to a button he can push.
“Everyone has just really helped out so much,” Love said. “And, I couldn’t be more thankful for it.”
Thankful.
So is dad, Alexander. So is 4-year-old big sister Addyson.
Thankful.
“We’re just thankful that we still have him here, today,” Love said. “Because he was given 48 hours to live and he is still here.”