My Story

Editor’s Note: “My Story” is a first-person column or a Q&A feature of a New Albany community member that centers on health. Have a story to share? Email cmiller@cityscenemediagroup.com. Submissions should be no more than 1,200 words.

Voice for Knowledge

Local mom raises awareness about RSV following personal experience

After 10 years as a television broadcaster, Shanisty Ireland decided she wanted to return to her hometown of New Albany with her husband Jeff.

“The schools and the community — we just love it. I mean, it’s interesting because I’ve definitely seen the old New Albany and the new and it’s just a wonderful place to be with our family,” Ireland says.

The Irelands now have five children: Luke, 9; Eden, 8; Adam, 6; Jude, 3 and Asa, 5 months.

Ireland has spoken about her experience with RSV, respiratory syncytial virus, with national news media including the TODAY Show and Yahoo, as well as locally with 10TV and the Columbus Dispatch. She has also written about

Shanisty Ireland and her youngest son, Asa

the experience, on her autobiographical blog, She’s Becoming Domestic. She also discussed her eldest children’s RSV experience in the May/June 2018 edition of Healthy New Albany, and following a recent surge of the virus, we decided to revisit the conversation.

Healthy New Albany Magazine:

Before one of your children was diagnosed with RSV, how did you address health challenges in your kids? How have you changed since?

Shanisty Ireland: Adam was my third child and he was diagnosed with RSV at 6 weeks old. And I was at the pediatrician’s office and they told me, “Your baby has RSV. Take him home, watch him, it could potentially be dangerous.” I was like, “What is RSV? I’ve never in my life heard of it.”

And it was during Christmas time. It was very busy. I wasn’t even seeing my actual pediatrician. They were like, “Hey, you know, we can go get the pediatri-

cian to come back and talk to you.” I said, “Just forget it, I’ll just go home. I’ll Google it, I’ll figure it out,” because I was very frustrated. I would say before Adam was diagnosed with RSV, I was just a typical mom with little kids who get sick all the time. So it’s just inevitable. Kids are kind of like Petri dishes, they’re germy, they’re gonna pick up everything. And that’s just the way it is.

And so I think I was just pretty casual and laid back about it. And then, when Adam was diagnosed with RSV and ended up at the hospital, I think things changed for me in terms of just the awareness of viruses in general. Growing up as a kid, I don’t remember ever hearing, “Oh, you just have a virus, go home and hydrate,” and now I just feel like all we do is hear about virus after virus, and so I think that I kind of took it in my own hands to become more educated about them and to be more educated about what RSV is. And when he made a full recovery and left the hospital, I made it my mission to try to educate as many parents as I possibly could about it and to talk about it. I think that it’s come so far because Adam is now 6, and when he had RSV I remember telling a lot of people, “Hey, say prayers for Adam, he has RSV. He’s in the hospital.” And so many people shared the same sentiment I did: “What is it? I’ve never heard that before.”

But now, just thanks to different media outlets and reporters and people talking about in articles like the one you’re publishing, I think it’s more common knowledge as to what it is now. So I think it’s come a long way in just the last six years since I had first heard of what it was.

HNA: What was it like having a child with RSV the first time versus the second time?

SI: The first time when Adam had RSV, we did exactly what the pediatrician’s office said and I took him home and I was watching him. I didn’t know what I was watching for. But I just figured, OK, well, we’re just going to go home and try to get healthy. And eventually his labored breathing got to a point where he needed to be rushed to the emergency room and he was very gravely ill. He had RSV, bronchiolitis, rhinovirus, double ear infection. So he was very, very sick. And I think that if we would have waited, and if I would have “watched” him any longer, we would have had a very different outcome with him.

Fast forward to October of (2022), and Asa, who’s our fifth child. I knew when one of my kids came home from school and they started coughing, I knew immediately it was just, you know, game over, ’tis the season, right? Everyone’s going to get sick this year. And when Asa started to kind of show signs of a cold, I even told my children, I said, “Hey guys, I just want you to know, he’s sick. He’s not extremely sick, but there might be a situation where I have to take him to the hospital.” I just don’t know how this is going to go. It was a Sunday. We went out and we did normal family errands. And Asa was with me the whole time. I went for a 30-minute jog here in the neighborhood and my husband

was watching Asa, and when I came back, he was like, “Hey Shanisty, you need to come upstairs and look at his breathing. It doesn’t look right.” And I swear within that 30 minutes he went from I could tell he had a little congestion to, oh my gosh, it’s labored breathing. We’re packing our suitcases and we’re going to Nationwide Children’s Hospital. So it happened very rapidly. And I did not hesitate at all this time. I didn’t call my pediatrician. I didn’t mess around with anything. We went straight down there because I knew where it was going. And I’m really thankful we did. When we arrived at Nationwide Children’s, they didn’t make us sit in the waiting room which was wonderful. They triaged him, they took him straight back, they hooked him up to all the machines. The doctors and the nurses were wonderful and Asa suffered from respiratory distress, a symptom of RSV. they were trying to explain to me everything that was going on, and I was kind of saying, I know, I’ve been here before. Which, you know, is a very emotional thing for me because I felt very thankful that I knew what was going to go on, but then I also had a lot of embarrassment in a sense because I feel like I should’ve known better. I should have known these signs were coming, but that’s just the way it goes. We just really don’t have any control over how our kids are going to get sick. The only thing we can really control are the actions we take. Adam was 6 weeks. Asa was 8 weeks, so about the same age. HNA: How did having your children hospitalized affect you as a mother and as a family? SI: I’m incredibly grateful that we live in this wonderful city. I couldn’t imagine if I lived in a different location or maybe even perhaps out further in the country without the resources. I mean, Nationwide Children’s Hospital, I cannot rave enough about them in general. The staff, the respiratory, the infectious disease department – everybody there is just phenomenal and they are the best, the best of the best. So I knew we were at the right place. I knew we were exactly

where we needed to be. I didn’t necessarily want to be there. But if you have to be anywhere, that’s where you want to be. And so I guess just as a parent when your child is hospitalized, it’s kind of one of those situations where you hate it for them. You hate that you’re there, but at the same time you’re so happy you’re there because they’re getting the best care and they’re going to be taken care of and they’re going to come out of it on top.

HNA: Why do you think it’s important to talk about it from a first-person point of view?

SI: I think first and foremost, there are still so many people that have never heard of it before. I think that it gets overshadowed by cold and flu and now COVID season. Everybody talks about COVID. Everyone talks about the cold and the flu and hey, you know, those are all really horrible, terrible viruses as well. But RSV is out there too. The reason why RSV I think sometimes it’s overlooked is because, for someone like you or I or even my older children, if they were to get RSV tomorrow, it’s just a cough, it’s just a cold, it’s nothing gravely, seriously dangerous.

It’s the No. 1 hospitalization for children under the age of 2 in the United States. And I think that people need to know that 99 percent of children at some point in time before they’re 2 years old will get RSV, and if you’ve never heard of it, then that’s a problem. Because it’s just so, so incredibly common. And the fact that it was the No. 1 cause of hospitalizations in the United States for children under 2 and I had never heard of it, that was scary to me. And that just really was a wake-up call when I started hearing some of the statistics. I think it’s the second most common cause of death for children worldwide behind malaria. And I still had never heard of it. And so when you hear stuff like that, the chances are everyone that you know has had it before but they don’t know what it is. That’s something we need to talk about. Now I share my story. I talked to you, I talked to all these media outlets and I also want to say that there is a line between raising awareness and scaring people.

I don’t share my story to terrify everyone and I have so many people reach out on social media saying, oh my gosh, my 9-month-old was just diagnosed with RSV and they’re terrified. OK, now, the chances are your 9-month-old, if that child is healthy, normally, they’re going to be fine. It’s scary, yes, it’s terrible. It’s a horrible cough. It’s really bad respiratory infection, but they’re probably going to be fine.

Why two of my children ended up in the hospital with the same exact thing? Researchers and doctors don’t know. There’s so much still that they’ve got to figure out about this virus because both of my babies were born full-term, almost

10 pounds. They don’t have any kind of compromised immune system whatsoever. But they both ended up on ventilators for five days at Nationwide Children’s Hospital because of RSV. So I just think it’s very important that people know what it is. Don’t be terrified of it. And understand that even if your child does get RSV, it does not mean you are going to be spending a week in the hospital. HNA: What are the important signs to look for when you have a baby during RSV season or at any point? SI: Adam had a fever but Asa never actually even developed a fever. But a fever is one. And, congestion in the nose is another. You’ll be able to tell if they’re starting to refuse to take a bottle or breast milk, or if they can’t hold it down. The labored breathing, it’s called belly breathing. You can tell when you see their ribs The Ireland children (front, from left) Asa, Jude; (back) Eden, Adam exposed. It’s extreme like sucand Luke tion in and suction out. That’s the best way I can describe it. There’ll be a V underneath their neck and they’ll have a little bit of a head bob as they’re trying to breathe. Those are the three signs of labored breathing. Also, if they haven’t had a wet diaper, if they have like a bluish tint to their lips, and if you do think that they are struggling from labored breathing, go ahead and start counting their breaths because anything over 60 breaths per minute is labored, and Asa was at like 78. So counting the breaths as well, and then also advocate for your child’s health. When you go into the pediatrician’s office and they say, well we’re going to test for X, Y and Z, and if they come back negative and if you want an RSV test, you have to advocate for it. You have to push for it and say I want them tested for this. I want you to know, because there’s no better advocate for your child than you. Editor’s note: Respiratory distress for a newborn is considered more than 60 breaths per minute and more than Claire Miller is an editor at CityScene Media Group. Feedback welcome at cmiller@cityscenemediagroup.com. 40 breaths per minute for ages 1-5.