IOWA CITY, Iowa -- At a young age, Kaelea Butterfield had problems breathing. After she was hospitalized five different times because of breathing trouble, her doctor prescribed breathing treatments.
When she was in kindergarten, a teacher noticed Kaelea wasn’t breathing well and sent her to the school nurse. When multiple treatments didn’t help, the nurse called 911.
“There were probably 12 medicines running through all of the IVs,” remembers Kaelea’s mom, Kristin. “They were hitting her with a bunch of EpiPens® [epinephrine injections to open airways in the lungs] on the way to the hospital and nothing was working.