Posted on 05/12/2024 2:11:29 PM PDT by nickcarraway
A woman in Wisconsin who survived a harrowing brush with death is celebrating a major milestone this year.
Jeanna Giese became the first person in the world to survive rabies without receiving the life-saving vaccine 20 years ago.
“It’s almost surreal to think, ya know, 20 years,” she said. “My life changed completely when I got sick.”
In 2004, Giese was 15 years old and living in Fond du Lac.
She was attending church one Sunday morning with her mother when a bat was seen flying around during the service.
“It flew to the back of the church and one of the ushers swatted it down,” Giese said.
Being an animal lover, Giese asked her mother if she could pick the bat up and take it outside. Her mother gave her the OK.
As she was about to place the bat into a tree, she said it bit her and changed her life forever.
Jeanna Giese spent months in the hospital as a teenager Jeanna Giese spent months in the hospital as a teenager(Jeanna Giese) “It did manage to stretch over and bite me in the finger and that hurt,” she said. “I always get asked, ‘Did it hurt? Did ya feel it?’ Yeah, I felt it. It hurt a lot.”
Giese said she pulled the bat’s fang out of her left index finger.
The mark left by the bite was almost microscopic. She said she wasn’t bleeding at the time because there wasn’t an open wound.
Giese and her mother cleaned the bitten finger with hydrogen peroxide and went on with their lives.
About three weeks later, Giese began to feel extremely lethargic and nauseous.
“I woke up and I could not get out of bed, my face was flush, I could hardly move,” she said.
Giese’s parents took her to St. Agnes Hospital in Fond du Lac.
Once there, doctors tested her for meningitis and Lyme Disease among many other conditions. All of the tests came back negative.
The doctors were stumped as to why Giese was so sick. As Giese’s condition continued to worsen, the decision was made to transfer her to Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin in Wauwatosa.
Dr. Rodney Willoughby, a pediatric doctor specializing in infectious diseases, said he was brand new at Children’s Hospital when Giese became his patient.
“This was actually the second time I was on call here. I knew nobody,” he said.
Dr. Willoughby sent samples from Giese to the Centers for Disease Control in Georgia where the diagnosis was confirmed. Giese had rabies.
“Well, I thought she was going to die,” Willoughby said. “That’s what they all did, that’s about the extent of my knowledge of rabies at the time was that there wasn’t much to do. It’s really 100% fatal.”
Willoughby said it was too late to administer the life-saving rabies vaccine at that point.
“The classic, conventional rabies vaccine has never failed since its introduction in the United States in the 1970s,” he said. “It’s probably our most efficacious and effective vaccine, although fortunately, we don’t have to use it often.”
At this point, the doctors hit a crossroads. Giese said doctors told her parents that she would either die in the hospital or they could take her home so she could die there.
However, Willoughby wasn’t ready to give up just yet. He decided to try something experimental.
“Whenever you improvise, the odds are against you, so you always worry,” he said.
Willoughby decided to put Giese in a medically induced coma, a move never attempted before with a patient suffering from rabies.
In 2004, Jeanna Giese was put into a coma in a last-ditch effort to save her life In 2004, Jeanna Giese was put into a coma in a last-ditch effort to save her life(Jeanna Giese) “He kind of came up with this idea to put me into a coma to kind of separate my brain and my body and let my own immune system fight off the virus,” Giese said.
Willoughby said he came up with the concept because rabies typically kills patients by causing the brain to overstimulate the heart, eventually making it stop.
“So, the idea that we could just suppress the brain so it couldn’t work as hard and so that it didn’t stop the body from living, that seemed like a reasonable idea and almost seemed too obvious,” Willoughby said.
For the next 14 days, Giese lay in a coma.
“They didn’t know if I woke up if I was going to be me or a vegetable or anything,” she said.
However, Giese slowly began to wake up.
“He (Willoughby) said, ‘Look over at your mom,’ and I moved my eyes and that’s when they were like, ‘She’s in there,’” Giese said.
Giese eventually started to move her arms and attempted to talk.
“I was basically a newborn baby at the age of 15. I couldn’t do anything,” she said.
But Willoughby said progress was made.
“We had no idea how she was going to come out of it. We had no idea what the complications were,” he said.
Over the next few weeks and months, Giese slowly started to regain control of her life. She re-learned how to walk and underwent strenuous physical, occupational and speech therapy.
“The road to recovery was very long and painful. I don’t quit. I guess it’s personal stubbornness,” Giese said.
Giese is now known around the world as a medical marvel. She is the first person on record to survive rabies without getting the vaccine.
She has been extensively covered by local media, including when she graduated high school and when she became a mother.
Giese is now a mother of three and works at the Children’s Museum of Fond du Lac.
“I always wanted to be a mom and now I am one and it’s just fantastic. I love my kids so much,” she said.
According to Willoughby, there are just 45 known survivors of rabies. He said 18 of those survivors overcame the virus by what’s now called the “Milwaukee Protocol.”
“She’s done everything that you’d want for any of your patients, so it’s just a total delight,” Willoughby said.
Years later, Giese is still an animal lover, even extending her compassion to bats.
“A lot of people are astonished that I actually love bats,” Giese said.
Rabies cases in the United States are pretty rare.
According to the CDC, this may be because of “successful pet vaccination and animal control programs and public health surveillance and testing.”
For more information on rabies, visit the CDC’s website.
now that’s a real physician, imho, a thinking man’s doctor. very impressed with his (Willowby’s) willingness to take a very calculated risk, where probably no additional harm could be done to this patient, who was likely dying without the intervention. i think Hippocrates would have been pleased with this doctor. i hope other doctors are learning from this one.
Bump
You know the old saying: What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger..
“ Giese’s parents took her to St. Agnes Hospital in Fond du Lac. Once there, doctors tested her for meningitis and Lyme Disease among many other conditions. All of the tests came back negative. The doctors were stumped as to why Giese was so sick.”
The parents never mentioned the bat bite?
Gee, thankfully he wasn't trying Ivermectin on a Covid patient.
/sarc
This was, and remains, a very interesting case. It also remains, as far as I know, unique.
If you or anyone else has a documented rabies exposure - get the vaccine.
wondering how long her list is. mine is long. VERY long.
Her parents sound like idiots.
Know of a case where a guy was bit by a rabid dog but the lab made a mistake and the test came back negative
It was not a good thing. Rabies is a very scary way to go
thanks for the post.
read the article and it’s ‘evidence’ is another very flimsy retrospective study, imho. very skimpy on data. they say there’s no clinical trials supporting the ‘efficacy’ of the Milwaukee protocol, but how could there be since rabies is so rare, but we’re only talking about 30 or so patients over their period of study which was 9 years 2005-2014. they make this hard conclusion against the results 2 survivors in 29, which is 1 in 15 (or 1 in 10 if they put back the other survivors they discount) for the claim of a 100% fatal disease, that is not bad. (they also discount survivors who get past the initial disease but die later from something else for no reason at all, imho.)
so all of this (low survival even with the protocol) not surprising given that the age of the survivor in the story is 15. so very young. i would suspect the older patients would have less chance of survival just on general principal. we also don’t have enough experience with this treatment. only 30 patients and they say get rid of it. ridiculous.
so they only had only 29 total patients over Europe and N. American patients which they claim were treated with major components of the Milwaukee protocol, even with that, they admitted 2 out of 29 survived in there study, but then they went on and questioned the diagnosis of rabies based on testing for antibodies. are you kidding me? i smell Big Med agenda in this ‘study.’
To contrast, i’ll post Willoughby’s paper which they referenced, give them credit. it has much more the ring of truth than theirs above, imho. 76 days in the hospital. no picnic even for a 15 year old. not surprised that survival would be problematic for an older adult. the above paper really needs to stratify statistically on younger patients with a lot more data, before they make the kind of conclusion they made.
Survival after treatment of rabies with induction of coma
Rodney E Willoughby Jr 1, Kelly S Tieves, George M Hoffman, Nancy S Ghanayem, Catherine M Amlie-Lefond, Michael J Schwabe, Michael J Chusid, Charles E Rupprecht
Affiliations expand
PMID: 15958806 DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa050382
Free article
Abstract
We report the survival of a 15-year-old girl in whom clinical rabies developed one month after she was bitten by a bat. Treatment included induction of coma while a native immune response matured; rabies vaccine was not administered. The patient was treated with ketamine, midazolam, ribavirin, and amantadine. Probable drug-related toxic effects included hemolysis, pancreatitis, acidosis, and hepatotoxicity. Lumbar puncture after eight days showed an increased level of rabies antibody, and sedation was tapered. Paresis and sensory denervation then resolved. The patient was removed from isolation after 31 days and discharged to her home after 76 days. At nearly five months after her initial hospitalization, she was alert and communicative, but with choreoathetosis, dysarthria, and an unsteady gait.
“Being an animal lover, Giese asked her mother if she could pick the bat up and take it outside. Her mother gave her the OK.”
Great job mom!
They gave her permission to carry a crazy bat outside. And then forgot to mention that factoid to the doctor.
got some real Mensa candidates here.
Not to mention that once symptoms appear it’s 100% fatal. So there is realistically no downside to trying the protocol, unless someone has a better idea someday. Sedation, antivirals and roll the dice. Very little else anyone knows to do.
That struck me as pretty odd also, and don’t these people know that bats spread rabies? Letting the girl pick up a bat that’s flying around during the day is not the brightest idea. She is lucky to be alive, it is one horrible way to go.
The doctor in this case was 1 for 1. That’s 100% success!
Why do they call it a vaccine when you get it post infection?
My grandmother got bit by a rabid fox while living in Grants Pass OR, in the 1905-1910 range. They had to haul her to Oakland/SF area to a doctor.. and quickly.
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