Thanks to generous people like you coming together to fund innovative technology through the Country 105 Caring for Kids Radiothon, specialists at the Alberta Children’s Hospital can treat children with the most fragile veins intravenously and make the process much less scary too – for kids and their parents.

Equipment like a point-of-care ultrasound and vein viewer are helping even the most experienced specialists locate veins more easily while minimizing discomfort for kids. Kids like Eliana.

Whenever she catches two-year-old chatterbox Eliana toddling around the house, Mom, Allison, joyfully rushes for her phone to take a video. She captures those moments to celebrate how far her little girl has come – from the moment their world changed.

It was June 22, 2023. Eliana and her older sister had both been sick with colds, and that morning Allison found Eliana listless, feverish and only semi-responsive in her crib. Then, Eliana had a seizure.

Allison raced her daughter to the Emergency Department at the Alberta Children’s Hospital, watching her continue to have seizures from the rearview mirror while enroute. Though they looked like small twitches, she worried about what unseen damage might be occurring in her brain.

As soon as they arrived, Eliana was swept into a trauma bay – a place Allison knew was reserved for the most at-risk patients.

As a veteran nurse at the Alberta Children’s Hospital, Allison found herself having to put her trust in other experts to care for her daughter as doctors, nurses and respiratory therapists surrounded Eliana in a trauma room.

While an MRI found some changes in her brain, and she had paralysis on her right side, an EEG didn’t reveal any seizure activity. She was admitted for monitoring, and then two days later, Eliana had another seizure.

Doctors needed to deliver special rescue medication intravenously to stop the seizure, but because she was so dehydrated, her veins were extremely difficult to access. Eliana was transferred to the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) and given a feeding tube through her nose for the medication. Using a point-of-care ultrasound, funded by Radiothon listeners, as guidance, specialists inserted a central line into her neck for other medications she would need.

In the PICU, the Neurocritical Care team of neurologists and critical care experts closely watched Eliana’s seizure activity to preserve her brain function and minimize damage. A second MRI found swelling on the left side of Eliana’s brain, and she was diagnosed with an incredibly rare condition called Hemiconvulsion-hemiplegia-epilepsy syndrome – the first case seen at the Alberta Children’s Hospital.