By Debra Lemoine
The Advocate
BATON ROUGE, La. — Fire ants are the scourge of the Louisiana lawn, but their venomous bites can be as dangerous as bee stings.
That is what Patrick Dodson, 13, and his mother, Donna Dodson, found out one Sunday afternoon in March while doing yard work at their Central home.
Patrick Dodson fetched a bag of mulch made from a tree blown down by Hurricane Gustav in September. When the bag tore open on Patrick Dodson’s way to the flower beds, his leg was covered in hundreds of ants.
“Once I noticed them, I kind of freaked out, and that’s when they started biting me,” said Patrick Dodson, 13. “It didn’t really hurt until 10 minutes afterward.”
His mother learned of the ants when she saw her son running across the yard.
They went inside, washed the ants off his leg and applied an antihistamine cream to the rising red welts. Donna Dodson said she sent her mother, Alice Reine, to the store for a liquid antihistamine to give her son as well.
Patrick Dodson went to lie down, and about 20 minutes later he came to his mother with a flushed face and swollen lips and nose, Donna Dodson said. She then decided to take him to a Lake After Hours clinic.
Once in the doctor’s office, Patrick Dodson passed out before his mother could finish filling out paperwork, she said. He woke up in the exam room where he was given a shot. He passed out again.
Because of his low blood pressure, an ambulance was called. The paramedics brought him to the emergency room at Baton Rouge General Medical Center’s Bluebonnet Boulevard campus.
“The venom from the ants just shut his body down,” Donna Dodson said. “It just quit. It was just too much.”
Once at the emergency room, he was given intravenous fluids to flush out the venom. His blood pressure continued to drop, and Donna Dodson was sent out of the room as they put her son on life support. Patrick Dodson’s heart stopped beating twice as hospital staffers tried to flush the venom out of his system.
“A couple of hours later, they told me he was in the ICU,” Donna Dodson said. “They couldn’t guarantee he would make it through the night.”
The Dodsons were in for a rough time in their son’s first two nights in the pediatric intensive care unit. Donna Dodson let Patrick Dodson’s two older brothers, both Marines who have served tours in Iraq, know of the boy’s situation. The American Red Cross flew them to Baton Rouge.
“When you have two in the military, you pray at night that they’ll come home to you,” Donna Dodson said. “You never think the one you have at home would be the one you lose. You never think of the baby at home.”
In three days, Patrick Dodson was weaned off the ventilator. By Friday, he was back home.
The Dodsons aren’t certain how many stings Patrick had. A nurse began counting them in the hospital and stopped at 210, Donna Dodson said.
The venom from ants is in the same classification as other stinging insects, such as bees, wasps and yellow jackets, said Dr. Melinda Frantz, director of the pediatric intensive careunit at Baton Rouge General Medical Center.
About 9.3 million people are stung by ants each year, and most experience what is called a “localized reaction” to ant stings, Frantz said. A localized reaction includes a bump that swells up from the skin.
Only 1-2 percent have what’s known as a generalized reaction to ant stings, which includes wheezing, dizziness, fever, vomiting and diarrhea, she said. Of those few, only about 5 percent go into anaphylactic shock, a severe allergic reaction that can be deadly, she said.
“It’s a very small percentage,” she said.
But when a severe reaction happens, it is important to seek help immediately either at a doctor’s office or the emergency room. People with known allergies to insect stings should carry an epinephrine injection with them, she said. The people who die from insect stings do so within 30 minutes to four hours after the bite.
“We’re talking about a very short window,” she said.
In Patrick Dodson’s case, the amount of venom in his system caused the allergic reaction, she said.
“It was probably the load of the toxin that took him over the edge,” Frantz said.
And, that toxin load also means his immune system will be hypervigilant and could overreact again from far fewer stings, she said.
Donna Dodson said her son now keeps an epinephrine injection with him at all times in case of another ant sting. Patrick Dodson said he has been bitten since.
But overall, things are getting back to normal.
“When somebody gets bit by ants, you’re like, ‘it’s ants,’ ” Donna Dodson said. “Do I really have to go? You start second-guessing yourself. Am I overreacting?
“They told me here if I had waited 45 minutes longer than I did, he wouldn’t have made it.”
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