OGDEN, Utah (ABC4) — The parents of 4-year-old Ellie are mourning their loss and speaking about their daughter’s life after she passed away due to complications from the flu.
Elora “Ellie” Ann Rudd passed away recently at only 4 years old. Her family said that she was taken to McKay Dee Hospital, where she was diagnosed with the flu and adenovirus. Adenovirus has similar symptoms to the cold and flu and is also highly contagious.
Her family added that the flu had gone around the family, starting around Christmas. At the beginning, Ellie was doing OK and seemed to be battling the flu pretty well. The entire family had similar symptoms, but Ellie developed a concerning cough, and Sarah Rudd, her mom, took her to the hospital.
“I took her in, (and) they kept her overnight because her oxygen was pretty low,” Sarah said, adding that they were preparing to be discharged until Ellie’s oxygen dropped again. Overnight, her condition worsened and she developed pneumonia and sepsis, requiring her to be life-flighted to Primary Children’s Hospital.
A team of doctors worked to try to increase Ellie’s oxygen levels and blood pressure while she was in the hospital.
“I think she was about four days in the PICU, and they took her in for a CAT scan the day that she died and saw that she had a stroke,” Sarah said. “They wouldn’t be able to fix it, so we made the decision to take her off life support, and she passed.”
Elora ‘Ellie’ Ann Rudd, a 4-year-old from Utah, passed away recently due to complications from the flu. | Courtesy GoFundMe
Sarah and Michael, Ellie’s parents, are now speaking on their daughter’s life and how much she means to them.
“We named her after the character from (the film) ‘Willow’, the little baby. She was very much a nurturing little girl; she loved her baby dolls,” Sarah said. “She loved to put them to bed at night, put them down for naps. She loved Barbies. She loved ‘One Hundred and One Dalmatians’, and ‘Frozen’.”
Sarah went on, “She was the sweetest little girl alive and would always come home from preschool and give me a present that she created in preschool. She was in school for speech therapy. … She was making bounds and leaps this year for it.”
Michael Rudd, Sarah’s father, said that Ellie was “always very sweet, always very sharing, very loving and affectionate.”
“She loved to have dance parties in her sister’s room all the time. They would go and turn off all the lights and get dressed up,” Sarah added.
At this point, the Rudds say they have more questions than answers, and one of those questions is most prominent in Sarah’s mind.
“I just wonder, ‘Why her?’… I don’t know why it hit Ellie so hard,” Sarah said. The Rudds’ oldest daughter also caught pneumonia and bronchitis while the family was sick and was hospitalized.
Fortunately, their oldest is doing better, but the Rudd family is still left with the hole left by Ellie’s loss. Relatives of the Rudds created a GoFundMe to help support the family with funeral and medical costs and to help support them as they grieve.
CLICK HERE to donate to GoFundMe.
Sarah concluded, “Hug your kids a little tighter, because you don’t know when the next day is the last day you can see them.”
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