ATLANTA — It's a traumatic experience no parent wants to go through: being accused of hurting your baby after they appear scalded and burned to medical professionals.
This most recent incident is similar to other reports in 11Alive's Rebecca Lindstrom's series "Help that Harms," which reports how some medical conditions can make parents seem like the ones to blame.
In this case, 11-month-old Jayce was left fighting for his life after getting a rare staff infection doctors couldn't detect. It's called Staphylococcal Scalded Skin Syndrome (SSSS) and could be deadly for kids under six years old.
"It's traumatic, it's shocking," Katelyn Tarr, Jayce's mother, said outside of the hospital where her baby was being cared for. "It's just, I have no words, honestly."
She and Jayce's father, Jeremy Debose, were able to get a proper diagnosis at Children's Egleston Hospital last week, but several hospitals earlier questioned the parents by doctors who thought he might've been abused and burned by scalding water.
"Every time I went to pick him up under his arms, he just went to scream as if he wanted to jump out of my arms, which just proceeded to actually just seeing him like his whole skin having to be peeled from his neck all the way down to his toes," Debose said.
What started off as a rash on the 11-month-old's cheek and pain under his arms quickly turned into a nightmare. Jayce is just learning how to walk, and his parents thought the rash on his cheek might've been a rug burn from falling. When they realized it was spreading and Jayce was in pain, they took him to Emory Decatur.
"They kept starting to ask, 'Where did this mark come from? Where did this mark come from?' And he's texting me, calling me, like, 'Where did these marks come from?' And I'm telling him I've never seen them, I don't know. It's just essentially, they're popping up left and right, like, as his skin's blistering. His skin was just just boiling and just getting hotter and hotter," Tarr said.
With doctors not knowing what it was and Jayce appearing to have been burned, the parents were accused of burning their baby boy and possible abuse.
"That was the hardest part for me because I have three children, and I love them more than I love life itself. To be accused of something like that was just hard," Tarr said. "I kept thinking, I know I checked the water, and I told them, 'Maybe it's because we switched it to Huggies diapers, or maybe it was this, or I used a different soap.' But no, none of those things happened. Then, eventually, you start questioning yourself. But no. He didn't even have a bath. It wasn't any liquid that caused it."
The extra questions while they tried to get their 11-month-old help another added layer of stress on top of the growing blisters on their baby's skin and both not being able to work while he was in the hospital.
"To have, you know, the doctors really stating and talking about boiling water, it really drove our nervous system up through a roof," Debose said.
Eventually, 50% of Jayce's body was covered in burns. When the blistering kept happening in front of the doctor's eyes, they transferred him immediately from one hospital to the next. The fourth hospital, Children's Egleston, made sure a biopsy was taken from a burn and blister.
"They said he has a Staphylococcal Scalded Skin Syndrome (SSSS), so it's a type of staph infection, and they couldn't have predicted it," Tarr said. "You couldn't have prevented it, but it essentially made his skin get scalds and burns as it would if he was scalded or burned."
Jayce's young age made him high risk and left him fighting for his life for a week. His skin was peeled from his neck all the way down to his toes, and doctors kept him on powerful pain medication before it healed.
"It just really shows me that prayers work," Tarr said. "I watched how amazing, a medical team can come together and just keep me in tune with things. I watched things I'd never seen before, like healing I'd never seen. Science I've never seen. An illness I've never seen that type of thing."
Fast word this past Sunday, Jayce's baby skin would heal enough to go home. He's a miracle for which his mother is happy she fought.
"You know your baby better than anyone else," Tarr said.
Tarr said a situation like this can cause you to question yourself as a parent, but if it's a case like this where you know you've done nothing wrong, the goal is to get your kid to the doctor quickly and advocate for them.
Jayce still has some healing to do, but doctors said he should be okay. He's home with the early birthday gift of health before he turns one next week. The family has an online fundraiser to help them with expenses and get them back on their feet.
11Alive Investigator Rebecca Lindstrom has been looking into the Help That Harms. Follow her investigation on demand via our streaming app 11Alive+ Available on Roku, Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV.