Yahoo Movies Jimmie Allen and Wife Alexis Recall How Daughter Zara 'Went Completely Blue' amid RSV Battle
Courtesy of the Allen family
Country singer Jimmie Allen and his wife Alexis are recounting their daughter Zara James' experience with RSV when she was just weeks old.
While chatting with PEOPLE about their partnership with Sanofi as spokespeople for Knowing RSV, an initiative that provides parents with educational resources about the illness, the couple also opens up about how their daughter, now 13 months, "went completely blue" amid her RSV battle last year.
Zara's health ordeal began shortly after she, her parents and older sister Naomi did some traveling in 2021. "When they're that young, they're always sick every other day and get us sick, so we didn't really think too much about it," Alexis, 26, tells PEOPLE. "And then Zara was sick a little longer, probably close to two weeks, and I was a little concerned about it."
After her little one "started sounding and looking different," Alexis says "it just didn't seem right," so she called husband Jimmie, 37, and they decided to bring Zara to the hospital. "When we went to the hospital, they just told us that it was just a common cold and to go home, do some home remedies, and basically get baby cuddles in, and it would be OK," she says.
But the next night, Alexis details that Zara still wasn't getting better, so she called 911 for help. However, "they turned me away and said that she looked fine and that it was probably just a cold," she explains.
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Though Alexis admits she thought "I was just a crazy mom of two, not sleeping and just seeing things," Zara's health didn't improve, and by the next morning she "looked really, really bad."
Bringing her daughter to the pediatrician in search of answers, Alexis says she then received Zara's RSV diagnosis. "They described to us that basically, with RSV, it gets worse before it gets better. So we were about day five, and usually about day seven or eight is when they start to turn the corner and seem a little better," she explains.
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Courtesy of the Allen family
But, while traveling on a tour bus to watch Jimmie perform in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, Alexis says that "Zara went completely blue and just completely out of it, limp."
Calling the ordeal "scary," Alexis says, "I don't want to say that she went unconscious, but she was not there. Her body just went out, and we had to wait for the ambulance to pick us up and take us to the hospital."
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A little over a year later, Jimmie says Zara is "good now" and "you wouldn't even know" she was sick with RSV at such a young age. "She's overly happy all the time," he adds.
Still, Jimmie says watching his daughter suffer from the illness was a new experience that left him with many questions. "I'm not that smart when it comes to the whole medical field, and even when the doctors were telling us what was going on, I still didn't understand it because they still weren't speaking in layman's terms," he explains.
Now, through their partnership with Knowing RSV, Jimmie and his wife of over two years are helping to "spread the word" about the illness, which is common and the typical cause of bronchiolitis and pneumonia in kids under 1 year old.
"I feel like that's our job as parents," he says. "Because everything we know now, someone else shared with us — whether it was anything about any sort of sickness, whether it's things about sports, whether it's about finances, whatever. It's because someone else took the time to share it with you."
"If you can be informed and be encouraged to not be afraid of whatever you're going through and just deal with it, I feel like it makes a big difference, so that's one of the reasons why we got on board," he continues, as Alexis adds: "It's just helping inform and spread the awareness of what this virus does, and even other viruses, to help prevent it moving forward."
