2-year-old girl faces long recovery after rattlesnake bite in Colorado
DENVER (KDVR) – A 2-year-old Kansas girl is fighting to recover after she was bitten by a rattlesnake earlier this week in Colorado.
The family says they received some good news after days in the hospital, but the road to recovery is expected to be long.
Colleen and Brett Robertson came to Colorado from their home in Kansas on Monday, staying at an Airbnb in Bennett with their daughter, Quinn, ahead of a wedding.
Within hours of getting there, they had to shift their home for the week to the hospital. What they heard when they got there was crushing.
“You hear things like ‘first time,’ ‘I’ve never seen anything this extreme,’ ‘she’s too small,’ ‘critical illness.’ Words that you just don’t want to hear,” Brett said.
Hours before, Colleen had taken Quinn outside the Airbnb to see some horses nearby in the yard.
“Quinn let out, like, a little cry, and I looked down, and I saw the rattlesnake,” Colleen said.
She was terrified to see that Quinn had been bitten twice on the thigh and screamed for Brett to call 911.
“Quinn within a couple minutes started going unconscious and started losing control of breathing,” Colleen said.
Because they were so far from a hospital, they needed a helicopter to fly Quinn to the Children’s Hospital Colorado in Aurora. Her parents had to drive.
“You see your child being taken away in this helicopter not knowing if their heart’s going to stop, and the whole drive is, like, ‘Are we going to see her? Are we going to see our Quinn at the end of this ride?’” Colleen said.
Doctors immediately worked to stabilize Quinn. She has required more than 30 vials of antivenom since Monday.
“They’ve had to call in vials from multiple hospitals in the surrounding area just to support her,” Brett said.
On Friday, they say they received good news.
Quinn is more stable than she’s been all week, and is slowly regaining her ability to sit up and use her arms and legs.
“I think the scary thing for a little girl who loves to dance and move so much is not knowing how long this road to recovery will be,” Colleen said.
As that road begins, they’re thankful the words they’re hearing around the hospital have changed.
“They’ve used words like ‘miracle,’ and they can’t explain the recovery at the pace it’s going,” Brett said.
The Robertsons want to say how thankful they are for the exceptional care they’ve gotten from the nurses and doctors at Children’s Hospital. They don’t yet know when they’ll be able to return home to Kansas.
