Wiggles how-to video on using oxygen helps save Covid patient Sarah Kelly
Staff at a Melbourne hospital were struggling to help a young patient who was critically ill with Covid when the Wiggles stepped in to execute a crazy plan.
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Sarah Kelly desperately needed oxygen.
Covid-19 had left her gasping as though she was sucking air through a tiny straw and, without help, she wouldn’t survive.
But each time intensive care nurse Steven Moylan and his colleagues tried to place oxygen tubes in her nose the anxious 22-year-old with Down syndrome resisted.
“She didn’t like wearing them. She would take them off and she’d catch you trying to put them on,” Steven says.
“We would try to sneak them on while she was sleeping but she was too cunning and would just knock them away.”
Staff at Royal Melbourne Hospital’s specialist adult intensive care unit had little experience caring for such a non-compliant patient.
Neither they nor Sarah’s father could help her understand that putting the tubes in her nose was becoming a matter of life and death.
The best they could do through a very long night on July 22 was to take advantage of Sarah’s love for the Wiggles, playing clips on a screen to keep Sarah awake, calm and sitting upright, to ease the strain on her chest.
By morning, Sarah’s situation was critical and she had to be placed on a ventilator in an induced coma.
But even if the machines sustained her long enough for the virus to pass, as soon as she was woken up Sarah would again need the oxygen tubes to survive.
Then Steven had a crazy idea.
Even if the best medics couldn’t get through to Sarah, maybe the Wiggles could.
GEELONG WINS, THE KELLYS LOSE
Just before Greg Kelly had gone to bed on July 13, he began to feel a bit ill.
The next morning he felt a lot worse, and he soon after feared why.
The Geelong victory he’d enjoyed at the MCG on the weekend was announced as ground zero for a new coronavirus outbreak.
Worse, Young and Jackson bar in the CBD, where he’d been with mates before the game, was an exposure site.
Greg, his wife Debra and daughters Lauren, 24, Sarah, 22, and Emily, 16, jumped in the car, drove for a Covid test and returned to isolate in their Point Cook home.
Initially, only Greg’s test came back positive, but after Debra started feeling sick a rapid testing team was dispatched to the house to take another swab. By July 16, all five family members were confirmed cases. Lauren’s boyfriend Daniel Boyd, who had been staying at the house, also tested positive.
Greg, who’d had his first shot of AstraZeneca, says: “It was the worst illness I’ve come across in my 56 years. The fatigue, nausea, loss of taste, loss of smell, temperature fluctuations. It was bloody awful. It was the worst flu times 100.”
And it hit the unvaccinated Debra much harder.
Fully-vaccinated Lauren had no symptoms and was “walking around the house as though nothing was wrong”, while unvaccinated Daniel spent days curled up on the couch unable to move. Emily had only mild symptoms.
But the biggest fears were for Sarah.
Down syndrome is among the medical conditions that make a person more vulnerable to Covid-19 and she had not yet been able to get a Pfizer jab.
Being non-verbal and fiercely determined to get on with life, it was also difficult to know whether she was having symptoms.
To help, the family bought an oxygen reader and frequently monitored it to ensure Sarah’s blood-oxygen levels remained somewhere near the healthy 95 to 100 per cent range.
SARAH’S STRUGGLE BEGINS
When Sarah’s levels crashed on July 21, the Kellys immediately called an ambulance and paramedics took her to hospital.
With Greg sick and Sarah needing somebody to support her, the two were admitted together into RMH’s Nine East Ward – the specialist infectious disease unit that was the epicentre of the state’s deadly second coronavirus wave in 2020.
But while they had neighbouring beds, the unfamiliar and stressful surroundings made it difficult for Sarah to co-operate.
In an unprecedented move, a second bed was set up in a sealed-glass intensive care room so the infectious daughter and father could go into ICU together if things worsened.
“Sarah didn’t understand what was going on. That’s why I was there, to try and keep her as calm as I could,” Greg says.
“She is a normal daughter with a bit of a difference. She’s not treated any differently from her siblings, other than she needs some assistance with doing things.”
Through the night, Sarah became critically ill, though nobody could teach her how to tolerate or use the high-flow nasal prongs needed to ease Covid’s toll.
In order to at least keep her awake and upright, Greg suggested showing Wiggles videos.
“The Wiggles are it. She loves the music, she loves the dancing, she loves the actions. It is all stimulation for her,” he says.
By the morning, Sarah was fading too quickly, barely able to breathe and with her blood-oxygen down in the 70s. RMH head of intensive care Associate Professor Chris McIsaac says doctors had no choice than to place a tube into Sarah’s lungs and connect her to a ventilator as she was anesthetised to sleep.
“She started to deteriorate late on the Friday (July 23),” Greg says.
“She wasn’t moving around as much. She wasn’t that interested in listening to her music and if that’s the case you know something is seriously wrong.”
HERO NURSE COMES TO THE RESCUE
Like many of his ICU and Covid ward colleagues, Steven was still scarred by the trauma of the pandemic’s worst in 2020.
Racking his brains over what could be done to convince Sarah to take the oxygen she’d need if she came out of her coma, Steven’s mind wandered to his brother Kieran.
“My brother also has an intellectual disability and has a big obsession with Spider-Man,” Steven says.
“Kieran would do whatever Spider-Man would do.”
So, he thought, if he could convince the Wiggles to record a personal clip for Sarah, showing her how to wear the oxygen tubes and take deep breaths, maybe she would accept them.
“For Sarah, the Wiggles have been something in her life for so long, but we’re just complete strangers trying to deliver care,” Steven says.
“So, to have something familiar like the Wiggles wearing something that she is not familiar with, I’d hoped the two would marry up.
“It was super important that we got her to do it because it could have been the difference between being successful off the ventilator and not.”
There was one problem.
“For a nurse like me, how am I going to get in contact with the Wiggles?” He says.
Steven tried reaching them through the ABC, their website and a friend who worked at the Starlight Children’s Foundation.
After 37 phone calls and a week of dead ends, he turned to Google, searching “how to call the Wiggles”.
Among a host of fan sites, one included a phone number.
A mystery superfan answered Steven’s call and was moved by Sarah’s story, so they passed on an email address enabling Steven to finally contact the world-famous group directly.
As soon as the Wiggles heard about Sarah’s plight they were desperate to help.
After a series of emails they worked out what Sarah most needed: to be comfortable wearing high-flow nasal cannula, undertake sets of five deep breaths followed by coughs, and do chest physiotherapy exercises.
With caps on the number of people who could gather under Sydney’s Covid restrictions, Blue Wiggle Anthony Field and “Dr” Red Wiggle Simon Pryce were joined in a studio by a dummy Dorothy the Dinosaur to simplify the vital messages, complete with real ICU oxygen equipment which Steven had couriered to them.
The Wiggles even used a bike light to make their own pulse oximeter – or in Wiggles-speak “the red glowing thing” – so Sarah would let ICU staff place one to her finger so they could monitor her vital signs.
“She was scared. She needed oxygen,” Anthony says.
“We thought we could present it to Sarah in a way that we were her friends, and we do it so it is not as scary.
“She could relate to it: ‘the Wiggles are putting that on, Dorothy is watching, hey, I’m going to do it too’. We tried to make it so it was fun.”
When Steven and his manager watched the clip together in an office at the hospital, both cried at the beauty of what had been done.
IT’S WIGGLE TIME
Sarah had been kept in a coma for three weeks.
Fears she would not be able to use oxygen once the ventilator was removed saw doctors keep her sedated longer than usual, in order to buy more time for her lungs to gain strength.
“Because we were concerned about our ability to deliver oxygen to her off the ventilator, we wanted to really make sure she was stable and safe on very low levels before we took her off the ventilator,” Assoc Prof McIsaac says.
On August 8, she was woken up, but only after Steven played the sleeping patient the Wiggles video for the first time.
“We were all very nervous,” Steven says.
“Before we extubated her I did show her the video, and that I was wearing the nasal prongs and that Anthony was wearing them, and then I put them on her,” he says.
“And she was very compliant … she wore them all day.”
Watching outside the glass room, Greg was overcome after seeing Sarah not only wake, but put on her oxygen tubes to mimmick her heroes and breathe along with the Blue Wiggle.
“It was absolutely brilliant,” he says.
Hours later the nurse caring for Sarah through the night reported she had continued to do the deep breathing exercises along with the Wiggles whenever she watched the clip.
HEALING FOR ALL
By August 13, Sarah had recovered so well she was able to leave ICU and again be cared for on Nine East, this time embracing the oxygen support.
And word of the Wiggles’ inspiring performance and Sarah’s recovery was lifting spirits across the whole hospital.
“We have obviously been dealing with Covid stuff for the past year and a half and I think we are all a little bit tired and burnt out,” Steven says.
“Everyone is just so excited that the Wiggles would go to that effort and it has just been something positive to talk about rather than daily case numbers and all the stuff that is a bit of a downer in ICU.
“We see some extremes where people don’t make it out of ICU and some people do.
“Seeing Sarah extubated and making it to a ward has been really uplifting for all of us.”
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