TULSA, Okla. — In a FOX23 Investigation, a 9-year-old girl was in the hospital a total of five days, and her mom thinks she got sick from playing in the Arkansas River. This all happened the weekend of the Big Dam Party. Tulsa’s Investigative Reporter Janna Clark has her story.
I talked to a 9-year-old girl, Eden, who went to play in the Tulsa Wave at the Arkansas River. She and her mom, Brenda Bicskey, told me they believe doing that made her really sick.
Brenda wasn’t with her kids that day. Eden went to the wave park with her dad and brother on Labor Day during the busy opening weekend for Zink Lake, the Tulsa Wave Park and more.
“I was on a tube with my dad and 12-year-old brother,” Eden said.
She told me she went down the flume four or five times.
Eden wasn’t wearing a life vest, and told me she kept falling off the tube into the water.
“So those big bumps over there where you go down, that’s where I fell off,” Eden said. “It goes vroom and quickly goes like that. So, I can’t hold on.”
She told me when she fell in the water, she panicked and felt scared.
“Very scary,” Eden said.
“I thought I was gonna die,” she added.
Brenda and Eden told me Eden fell off numerous times while they were rafting, and a couple of times she got trapped underneath the raft.
Eden said she swallowed a lot of the water.
“She said she was miserable the fourth time through,” Brenda said. “She was crying and saying she was done with this. She said she was choking a lot. I think she just took in a lot of water.”
“I wanted to stop because I didn’t want to die,” Eden said.
Eden did stop, and she went home.
Brenda told me Eden developed a fever the next day.
“The next day she developed a fever, like 102,” Brenda said. “The following day, it was like 104.7. I took her to the ER that night. She was having trouble breathing.”
Eden doesn’t remember much about being sick, just that her temperature got really high.
“It was scary,” Brenda said. “Her fever was really high. She was very lethargic.”
At the ER, a doctor gave Eden antibiotics and told Brenda about water quality issues in the Arkansas River. The doctor told her it had been closed Sunday, the day before Eden played in the flume.
“The first doctor informed me about the closure and printed out the article,” Brenda said.
Brenda said the doctor printed off a story that aired on FOX23 and gave it to her. The story is titled, “ The Wave Park at Zink Lake closed due to water quality concerns .”
“She said, ‘Oh yeah it was all over the news,’ and I didn’t know about it,” Brenda said. “And my thought was why would they reopen it on Labor Day if it was closed on Sunday and all these people were in the water, it didn’t make sense to me.”
The doctor wrote in Eden’s report that she was concerned the river water started a bacterial infection.
“I am concerned that the river water may have started a bacterial infection,” the doctor wrote.
Five days later, Eden’s fever was still high, so Brenda took her back to the hospital.
Doctors then diagnosed Eden with bacterial pneumonia and put her on a heavier dose of IV antibiotics.
“The doctor said it was likely from bacteria in the water,” Brenda said.
Since January, the City of Tulsa started testing the Arkansas River for bacteria. The results go on the dashboard on the City’s website for anyone to check.
I’ve told you how some of the testing sites on the river have shown high levels of bacteria called E. coli. The numbers were especially high this summer. Since the temperatures have gone down, so have the levels of bacteria.
After four more days in the hospital, Eden got better. Even though she doesn’t remember a lot about being sick, she said she does remember she got popsicles and got to watch movies.
Brenda said Eden had never been that sick before.
“My daughter is typically healthy, never been this sick before,” she said.
Brenda told me she wanted to talk with me about this to let other parents know what happened to Eden.
“When you have real life experiences of family members getting sick and very ill, that’s something different,” she said.
I asked Brenda for her assessment of what’s in the water.
“I would never let them come back here,” Brenda said. “I think parents need to know. I understand the excitement, it’s fun and rafting and all that. At the expense of getting sick from bacteria in the water, it’s not worth it. I think they need to do something here to clean it up.”
In fact, Eden told me about something she thinks she must have swallowed when she fell in the water.
“The next morning, I found a piece of trash bag in my throat,” Eden said.
Eden told me she found the piece of the trash bag while she was brushing her teeth.
“I was brushing my teeth, I was choking, I saw a shadow in my throat, so I reached my fingers, so I pulled it out and it was white trash bag,” she said.
“I was like this is not expected and threw it away,” Eden added.
Brenda said just looking at the water, you can see it’s not that clean.
“I mean got God knows what’s in there,” she said.
Eden told me why she thinks she got sick.
“I think I got sick because the water has a lot of bacteria in it,” she said.
“I don’t wanna come back,” Eden added.
For now, Eden will play it safe and just walk with mom alongside the river.
I reached out to a local infectious disease doctor who said it’s “logical” that Eden got sick from ingesting the river water.
I also asked the Tulsa County Health Department about this, and they said since bacterial pneumonia can be caused by various bacteria, it would be difficult to figure out if there’s a direct correlation to the Arkansas River.
The City has repeatedly said even though playing “on the water” is allowed, they don’t want people to swim in the water.
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