Child's rare death from blood clot leaves void

PORTSMOUTH

Nearly a month after her grandson's death, Carolyn Brooks is still looking for closure.

One night the 9-year-old, who loved playing baseball, complained about a pain in his leg. The next morning, he was gone.

The medical examiner's report said Antonio Brooks died after a blood clot in a leg vein broke free and lodged in the arteries of his lung. She wonders if things would be different if she had insisted he go to the doctor. And she doesn't understand why this would strike a young, vibrant child.

"I just can't believe it's real," she said.

Blood clots in children are rare, said Dr. Eric J. Werner, a pediatric hematologist and oncologist with the Cancer and Blood Disorder Center of the Children's Hospital of The King's Daughters.

Werner knew nothing about Brooks' grandson but said statistics put the incidence of blood clots in children at roughly one in 100,000. Only a small percentage actually die from them.

For the most part, he said, parents need not worry about a blood clot every time a child complains of leg pain. Usually swelling and discoloration accompany leg pain associated with clots, he said.

"Most kids who do develop a blood clot usually have some other contributing cause," said Werner, who serves on a committee of the American Academy of Pediatrics for his specialty.

Those causes can include such chronic health problems as cancer and heart disease. "For a healthy child, it's very rare even if you have an inheritable condition that increases the risk," he said.

Chesapeake resident Davaline Perry understands the shock that Brooks is experiencing. She looked at her son, Brehon, and saw a healthy athlete.

"Brehon has been playing sports all of his life," she said.

Last summer, she and her husband took Brehon to the emergency room for a severe headache. They learned it was caused by blood clots in the left side of his head. After months of treatment, he's now back on the baseball field at Great Bridge High School.

"It's a scary situation," Perry said.

In another case, Morgan Epstein, a 17-year-old from Williamsburg, inherited a gene mutation that increases the risk of a clot forming in a blood vessel, called thrombosis. At 16, a doctor prescribed birth control pills to treat an acne condition. The combination, she later learned, is "just like digging your own grave."

One day she woke up with swelling from her left leg up to her navel, she said. She spent months in treatment at CHKD, later writing a song about her experience to raise money for the hematology section.

Brooks said her grandson, known affectionately as Tonio, had always been healthy. She had raised the boy since he was 2, she said.

She said the honor roll student loved sports. Last summer, he pitched baseball in Little League.

"They called him a natural," she said.

A year ago, Antonio had another incident of leg pain. He said he couldn't walk and his grandmother couldn't lift him, so she had an ambulance take him to the emergency room of a local hospital.

The medical staff took X-rays but found nothing, Brooks said, telling her it was "growing pains."

That's what she thought it was on the night of Feb. 14, when Antonio complained again of leg pain. The next morning, she asked if he wanted her to take him to the doctor. But his class at school was having a party and he wanted to wait, she said.

Brooks, who works a split shift as a bus monitor for a preschool program, went on to work. But she called Antonio a short while later to make sure he was up and getting ready.

He told her his leg was feeling a little better. She called again five minutes later but got no answer. She rushed home.

The first thing she heard was the buzzing of the alarm clock. Antonio was lying in bed, his head tilted back and like he was trying to breathe. She yelled his name and heard what sounded like a "breath of air."

She phoned 911. Medics worked on him, but they couldn't revive him.

Brooks comforts herself with the thought that he held on to his last breath until she had him in her arms.

Janie Bryant, (757) 446-2453, janie.bryant@pilotonline.com