A 13-year-old girl in England ended up in an induced coma after what was first thought to be a stomach bug. Felicity-Jo was taken to hospital in February with severe abdominal cramps and sickness, discharged the next day, and then collapsed again on March 15 in a case that quickly turned life-threatening.
Natalie-Anne Rowlett, her mother, said Felicity-Jo was left in a coma for two weeks after emergency surgery and a string of complications that followed a bowel obstruction. The teenager had first been sent home from the Royal Blackburn Teaching Hospital after doctors suspected gastroenteritis, only for the underlying problem to later be traced to congenital scar tissue in her bowel.
The details matter because the illness did not stay minor for long. Rowlett said her daughter’s symptoms began with abdominal pain and persistent vomiting, and that fluids briefly seemed to help. But the pain returned with far greater force a month later, when Felicity-Jo woke in agony, rolled on the floor and screamed before being taken to Burnley General Teaching Hospital and then to intensive care.
Doctors later told the family she had been born with adhesions, a form of scar tissue in the bowel that can cause blockage. In Felicity-Jo’s case, the obstruction was followed by infection and sepsis, a rapid escalation that required emergency surgery at the Royal Blackburn Teaching Hospital before she was transferred to the pediatric intensive care unit at the Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital. By April 14, Rowlett was speaking publicly about the dangers of sepsis and had set up a GoFundMe fundraiser to help cover the cost of the child’s ongoing hospitalization.
The tension in this case is the gap between the first diagnosis and the danger that followed. Rowlett said doctors initially believed it was gastroenteritis, or a stomach bug, and wanted to scan her daughter but did not do so after she appeared to improve. That brief reprieve may have masked a condition that was already building toward obstruction, infection and a coma that lasted two weeks.
For Rowlett, the lesson is now painfully clear: a symptom set that can look routine in one child can point to something far more serious in another. Felicity-Jo is alive after surgery and intensive care, but the question for her family is no longer what it was at the start of February. It is how long recovery will take after sepsis, surgery and two weeks in a coma.
