As the winter cold season arrived and high school volleyball season approached, a stuffy nose and a headache were annoyances for 15-year-old Aedan Jones, not alarms.
But days before Christmas, the Fort Lauderdale High School junior’s headache worsened, and a fever set in. What happened next set into motion a spiral of events that turned a sinus infection into a brain infection and launched Jones’ ongoing battle to live.
With a slight fever, Jones’ mother brought her typically healthy son to the urgent care, where doctors ruled out the flu and COVID and suggested Motrin and Tylenol. For a few days, Jones felt a bit better, the pressure in his sinuses and fever easing. On Christmas Eve, though, his situation deteriorated rapidly. He awoke with the left side of his face numb, his left eyelid drooping, and he couldn’t pick up his left leg to walk.
“When we arrived at Joe DiMaggio, he looked like he had a stroke,” said Jodi Washington, Jones’ mother.
The emergency room doctors moved quickly. They saw the droopy eyelid, the subtle facial asymmetry, and the confusion. The images from an MRI head scan came back terrifying, his mother said. There, in Jones’ frontal lobe, nestled dangerously close to the areas controlling speech and movement, was a collection of pus. A sinus infection, a typically benign annoyance, had traveled through the thin bone separating his sinus cavity from his brain, allowing bacteria to seep in and spread.
“We need to operate immediately,” Dr. Dean Hertzler, a neurosurgeon at Joe DiMaggio, told Washington. “The pressure is building, and if we don’t drain this, it could cause permanent damage.”
While a sinus infection evolving into a brain infection is rare in children, doctors are seeing it more often. “Thousands and thousands of people get sinus infections,” Hertzler said. “It’s a very small percentage that this happens to. With children, late elementary into the teens is when we see it.”
In the afternoon hours of Christmas Eve, Hertzler carefully navigated the delicate tissues of Jones’ brain. “The surgery itself is much less risky than not doing it,” the neurosurgeon said.
First the medical team drained the pus collected in Jones’ brain. “It was pretty infected, so we washed it all out, and then the ENT (ear, nose, throat) doctor went in and washed out the sinuses, and we got cultures for treating the infection,” Hertzler said.
As doctors moved swiftly, the South Florida volleyball community rallied, setting up a GoFundMe page and praying for Jones’ rapid recovery. “Aedan is a driven, competitive volleyball player who gives everything he has — to his team, his sport, and those around him,” Misty Connelly wrote on the fundraising page. “Right now, however, he is facing the toughest match of his life. Our volleyball community — and all those who know and care about Aedan — are coming together to support him and his family during this incredibly difficult time.”
Connelly, a fellow parent of a player on the Ocean Bay Volleyball Club, told the South Florida Sun Sentinel: “Aedan is a spitfire, a jokester, a fun kid to be around. He is not the tallest on the court, but he is the most explosive.” She said teammates, as well as those on competing teams, want to support him. “We know it’s going to be a long road ahead for him.”
Aedan Jones takes a shot during a volleyball game in Fort Lauderdale (Jodi Washington/Courtesy)
While the surgery at Joe DiMaggio went well, an infection continued to spread in his brain. A few days after his Christmas Eve surgery, Jones suffered an 18-minute seizure. Another MRI brain scan found he had a big pocket of pus in the orbit behind his left eye, creating pressure.
Jones was then transferred to Miami’s Holtz Children’s Hospital, where he could access specialists at Bascom Palmer Eye Institute.
“He’s been in intensive care this entire time,” Washington said. “They took him off the ventilator and he is breathing on his own again.”
At Holtz, Jones continues to fight the brain infection and has undergone multiple surgeries, including one last week. He has had surgery to drain his sinuses again, another to remove bacteria behind the eye, and a third in parts of the brain that affect movement on his right side. A team of doctors from various specialties participates in his medical care.
“We had him on broad-spectrum antibiotics to try to treat the infection, and he did regain movement of the right side and the ability to speak,” said Dr. Heather McCrea, director of pediatric neurosurgery at Holtz Children’s Hospital. “We do surgery because antibiotics are not going to work quickly enough.”
McCrea said the bacteria in Jones’ brain while at Joe DiMaggio differ from those found in his brain while at Holtz. “It’s likely one of the bacteria was being partially treated, but other bacteria may not be fully treated and continued to cause problems,” McCrea said. “Now he’s on three different antibiotics at strong levels to cover anything that could be there.”
Jones, the youngest of Washington’s three children, had played in a volleyball tournament in Los Angeles only nine days before he landed in the hospital. “He is one of those kids who have a magnetic personality and can connect with anybody,” Washington said. “Even in the ICU, his personality is shining through.”
Each day, Jones works to resume his previous strength and abilities. He is getting physical, occupational and speech therapy.
“He can talk and communicate, but he doesn’t always get his words out,” his mother said. “His speech is really slurred, but it’s coming back.”
McCrea said she is pleased to see Jones talking and walking. “He is making great strides.” Soon, he will get another MRI of his brain to see if he is clear of infection.
Washington said she recognizes recovery will take time and require emotional and financial support. She has been by her son’s side in the intensive care unit day and night.
“I’m one of those people, I never ask for help,” she said. “Aedan’s got a really supportive family around him, and we always just kind of make things happen. But I am grateful that people really want to do something to help.”
McCrea at Holtz said she and other pediatric neurosurgeons in the U.S. are collaborating to determine why Jones and other young people have been experiencing sinus infections that spread to the brain more often in the last few years.
“We are looking closely at it because there’s a thought that this has increased in frequency post-COVID,” she said. “We are really trying to get at what has caused this increase. We’ve been looking at commonalities between these cases as well as the treatments to improve care for our patients.”
Doctors like Hertzler and McCrea advise parents to bring children, including teens, to a doctor immediately if they complain of a severe headache or sinus pressure. “If they have a true sinus infection, then they will likely need antibiotics to clear that and the pediatrician is the best first step for that.”
South Florida Sun Sentinel health reporter Cindy Goodman can be reached at cgoodman@sunsentinel.com.