GREENVILLE, N.C. (WITN) – Fendi Perry is like any other seven-year-old. She likes riding on her scooter and dreams of being a YouTube star. What isn’t normal is what she survived: An emergency trip to the hospital and more than a week hooked up to a machine that breathed for her.
Fendi has lived with lung issues for years, and it has always been manageable. But in September, her mother, Toya Stancil, got a call from Fendi’s father that their daughter couldn’t breathe while at school.
“She came home, and I immediately looked at her, and she looked like she was fatigued. She fell to the ground, and I just ran and got the nebulizer and did a breathing treatment,” Stancil said.
Despite two treatments, Fendi was still struggling, leading her parents to take her to the hospital.
“They gave her oxygen, and they could not find out what was going on. Her oxygen levels would not increase. They kept decreasing and going down,” Stancil said. “Probably an hour later, they decided to call the helicopter from ECU.”
Fendi was loaded onto a helicopter and flown to Greenville, where she was connected to an ECMO machine that breathed for her while her lungs healed.
“When I watched her with all those tubes in her mouth, I mean, I just felt like my world was crushing and my life was over,” Stancil said. “It was a fatal asthma attack is what they diagnosed her with.”
An excruciating nine days later, Fendi had recovered enough to finally breathe on her own.
“I was very relieved and blessed, and when she was talking about walking around, I was crying tears of joy,” Stancil said.
Then came a new challenge as Fendi’s therapists helped her re-learn how to do almost everything.
“Walking and talking,” Fendi said when asked what they helped her with.
Stancil said she had many questions about what her daughter was going through while she was being cared for at the James and Connie Maynard Children’s Hospital, and she said the staff members were always ready with answers.
“Being that I know her best, my input was very important, so they made me feel very important, like a mother, and I appreciated it,” Stancil said.
Fendi is now back at home. Stancil thanks Maynard Children’s Hospital for helping her daughter recover and encourages other people to donate to the hospital.
“Helping someone is just like helping yourself because you never know when you need help, but if you give to something now, and you need it later, it’ll be there for you,” Stancil said.
The ECMO machine at Maynard Children’s Hospital is one of only a few in this part of the state.
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