A grieving mother is warning other parents not to dismiss a child’s persistent cough as a seasonal bug, after the seemingly mild symptom was later linked to the fatal heart condition that claimed her three-year-old daughter’s life.
Penny Dunn had been a lively and healthy toddler who was rarely unwell, but around Christmas she developed a cough that refused to go away.
As the cough continued into the new year and Penny also started struggling with breathlessness, her mother, Courtney, 27, took her to a GP, where she was given an asthma inhaler.
But the inhaler brought little improvement, and by the summer Penny’s condition had worsened dramatically, with the little girl beginning to experience seizures.
Further tests in hospital eventually revealed she had dilated cardiomyopathy, or DCM, a serious disease of the heart muscle that causes the heart to become enlarged and weakens its ability to pump blood effectively around the body.
Doctors conducted major surgery to repair the damage, but the condition had already compromised the flow of blood and oxygen to the toddler’s brain and other organs.
Within weeks of the operation, Penny was unresponsive, and her parents made the devastating decision to turn off her life support machine on July 6th.
‘She was at a point where she wouldn’t have any quality of life if she survived,’ said Ms Dunn, a factory worker, from Gloucestershire. ‘She’d have to stay intubated on a machine forever.’
Penny Dunn, 3, developed a cough in December that wouldn’t go away – it was a red flag
‘I don’t blame anyone because they [the doctors] tried their best. They said there are lots of factors that could have caused this.’
Some 4,000 Britons are diagnosed with dilated cardiomyopathy every year, and it is a major cause of heart failure in the UK.
It is far more common among adults than it is children, however infants under one are at much higher risk.
Experts still aren’t exactly sure what causes it, especially in children, however it’s known to be triggered by underlying genetic mutations as well as viral infections.
‘Penny was the happiest, bubbliest little girl ever. She truly became my best friend,’ said Ms Dunn.
‘She was just so happy and clever. She was never ill, I think she had had one cold before this in her whole life.’
But the cold that appeared last winter ‘never went away’.
‘We were told she had a childhood bug, but the cough wasn’t going away and it got to the point where she started throwing up,’ said Ms Dunn.
By spring time, the family were back and forth to the GP.
‘We have to walk upstairs to our doctors and she was so out of breath for at least five minutes,’ recalls Ms Dunn.
The condition is very rare is children, especially in those over the age of one, studies show
Penny Dunn was kept alive via a life support machine, as a heart transplant wasn’t an option
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‘The doctor said that wasn’t right for a three-year-old.’
Within a few weeks Penny went from ‘really happy and running around’ to ‘being lethargic and refusing food’.
Then, while taking part in her nursery sports day at the end of June, she suffered a seizure.
Penny was rushed to her local A&E where doctors found her heart was beating abnormally and not pumping blood around her body effectively.
After medication proved unsuccessful, she was transferred to a specialist hospital where she was placed on an advanced life-support machine – and later diagnosed with dilated cardiomyopathy.
Doctors performed surgery in an attempt to repair the heart’s beating mechanism which appeared, at first, to result in an improvement.
‘We were all so excited because she came out of theatre and her heart rate was stable,’ says Ms Dunn.
‘I thought our little girl was going to come home, that we were finally getting somewhere.’
But the day following the surgery, Ms Dunn noticed that Penny’s abdomen was unusually hard.
What’s more, her brain activity – as displayed on the monitors beside her hospital bed – appeared ‘different’.
CT scans showed that parts of Penny’s brain and bowel had sustained devastating damage due to lack of blood flow.
Penny’s mother described her as a ‘happy, clever, active toddler’ who was rarely unwell
The family set up a fundraising page earlier this year to help with costs of Penny’s care
‘My heart dropped because I knew you can fix the heart but you can’t fix the brain,’ says Ms Dunn.
Some patients with the disease recover with the help of a heart transplant but, due to the complexity of Penny’s condition, she was not eligible.
‘Even with a new heart, there was a possibility she would not survive,’ says Ms Dunn.
The family were told the life support machine could save the little girl for a limited number of days and, eventually, had little choice but to decide to turn it off.
Reflecting on the ordeal, Ms Dunn said she wished she had ‘trusted her gut’ and pushed for further tests when her daughter first became unwell.
‘I don’t want to scare parents, but she had a cold in December and it went downhill from there,’ she said, adding that a machine that can spot abnormal heart activity ‘should be in every GP surgery’.
‘Definitely trust your gut. If you’re not happy, get a second opinion.’