Lisa Fifield (36) and her husband Erol (46) welcomed their daughter Ophelia into the world on October 5, 2023. However, after 16 months, a great tragedy struck them when their little girl was found in a crib with no signs of life. The mother is now urging parents to trust their instincts, even if children show only subtle signs of illness, she writes.
“She was really calm, like a kid with an old soul. Some kids can be wary of strangers, she wasn’t. She really trusted them. She loved to laugh and very rarely cried. She was a very strong child, even though her teeth were growing. And the obsession with bananas – you’ve never seen anything like it. You gave her a banana and she ate it in two seconds,” said Lisa.
After her first birthday, Ophelia started going to daycare and soon contracted several viruses and infections. Over the course of three months, she suffered from lung, eye and ear infections, hand, foot and mouth infections, as well as diarrhea and nausea. “She started going to daycare and everything got worse. People always say that children get sick there, so I thought it was normal. We went to the doctors with her for about three months because of her lungs,” recalls the devastated mother.
During this period, Ophelia had a sporadic cough. Lisa repeatedly asked to have her lungs checked, but the doctors assured her that everything sounded fine. “One day at daycare she coughed up some blood. We took her to the emergency room. They told us that since she was playing happily, she must be fine. No one did a lung X-ray or any other tests.” she stated. The day before her death, Ophelia vomited in the crib at night, had a high temperature, and vomited again after being fed. Lisa also noticed a strange sound in her lungs, her unusual tiredness, and her reluctance to leave her mother.
“I couldn’t sleep and watched her all night. The little one fell asleep at five in the morning. My husband went to check on her between 6 and 7 am and found her unresponsive. It was the scariest day of my life – it felt like a living nightmare,” she described. Both Lisa and Erol administered first aid to Ophelia until paramedics arrived. Despite medical help, she died around 09:00.
As the initial cause of death, doctors listed sudden unexplained death in childhood, however, an autopsy revealed that Ophelia had pneumonia. “The cruelest blow was finding out that her death was caused by a health problem that I had repeatedly pointed out. This truth was like a dagger in my heart. She could and should still be here,” she admitted.
According to the British National Health Organization (NHS), they can symptoms of pneumonia in children include a cough with yellow or green mucus, shortness of breath, high fever, chest pain, tiredness, loss of appetite, wheezing or grunting.
“These little symptoms can be something serious, like pneumonia, and you don’t even know it. Their condition deteriorates so quickly – Ophelia died within one to two hours. My advice to parents is to trust their intuition, look for information about symptoms, ask for examinations and, if necessary, seek a second opinion,” he appeals in conclusion.
