When a sprinkling of a reddish rash appeared on Jack McMorrow’s hands in mid-April, his father figured the 14-year-old was overusing hand sanitizer —- not a bad thing during a global pandemic.
When Jack’s parents noticed that his eyes looked glossy, they attributed it to late nights of video games and TV.
When he developed a stomachache and didn’t want dinner, “they thought it was because I ate too many cookies or whatever,” said Jack, a ninth-grader in Woodside, Queens, who loves Marvel Comics and has ambitions to teach himself “Stairway to Heaven” on the guitar.
But over the next 10 days, Jack felt increasingly unwell. His parents consulted his pediatricians in video appointments and took him to a weekend urgent care clinic. Then, one morning, he awoke unable to move.
He had a tennis ball-size lymph node, raging fever, racing heartbeat and dangerously low blood pressure. Pain deluged his body in “a throbbing, stinging rush,” he said.
“You could feel it going through your veins and it was almost like someone injected you with straight-up fire,” he said.
Jack, who was previously healthy, was hospitalized with heart failure that day, in a stark example of the newly discovered severe inflammatory syndrome linked to the coronavirus that has already been identified in about 200 children in the United States and Europe and killed several.
The condition, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is calling Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children, has shaken widespread confidence that children were largely spared from the pandemic. Instead of targeting lungs as the primary coronavirus infection does, it causes inflammation throughout the body and can cripple the heart. It has been compared to a rare childhood inflammatory illness called Kawasaki disease, but doctors have learned that the new syndrome affects the heart differently and erupts mostly in school-age children, rather than infants and toddlers. The syndrome often appears weeks after infection in children who didn’t experience first-phase coronavirus symptoms.
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Neither Jack nor his parents, John McMorrow and Doris Stroman, know how he became infected with coronavirus. After cleaning out his locker at Monsignor McClancy High School on March 18 to continue school online at home, he only left the apartment once, they said, to help his mother wash clothes in their high-rise building’s laundry room. His parents and 22-year-old sister also avoided going out and the tests they’ve had turned up negative.
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On May 7, 10 days after being hospitalized, Jack went home and traipsed around the apartment channeling Pinocchio: “I’m a boy! There are no strings on me!”
He’ll require follow-up cardiology appointments and will take steroids and blood thinners for a while. He may have some heart-valve tears and residual cardiac inflammation, but doctors expect those to heal on their own. Jack and his family have taken genetic tests as part of research into the syndrome, and he and other survivors will be followed as doctors strive to learn how to recognize and treat it.
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