In 2024, Zie was a 13 year old active boy. One fever changed the Romero’s life forever. Zie now suffers from a one in a million diagnoses called FIRES, as well as refractory epilepsy.
With your support, Zie with the help of his mom Liz and dad Ozzie have set out to bring awareness to Febrile Infection Related Epilepsy, amongst other diagnoses.
This site you will find the hard truth of a mom, Zie’s journey updates, and lots of love.
Ozzie (Zie) was a 13 year old who loves football. All football. He makes our house do fantasy football so we watch ALL games possible. Unfortunately during week 18 of the 2023 NFL football season, Zie started running high fevers. Our small town hospital and clinic ran tests multiple times but everything came back negative. Zie rapidly worsened, his fever striking as high as 106 and as low as 96. It was just a high fever.
Until January 13, 2024.
Zie asked for us to wake him up the night the Dolphines played the Chiefs in the record breaking cold weather. 10 minutes into the 2nd quarter, Zie had his first tonic-clonic seizure.
We rushed him to our hosptial where he continued to have tonic-clonic seizures, for hours.
You see, that night was record breaking with coldness in Nebraska, we had a -42 degree wind chill, getting colder further east, which we found had halted all Omaha helicopters, ambulances, and planes from being able to come the 230 miles to get him.
That’s where Children’s Colorado came in and became the absolute biggest blessing we didn’t know we needed.
They were able to send a plane here to pick us up, but they needed a heated hanger, the closest was the next town over. So our local volunteer fire and rescue department braved the weather to go and pick up the flight nurses, bring them to our small hospital, and then take Zie and his mom back to the plane. The plane only had room for one parent. His dad made the drive with family.
By the time we landed, Zies seizures kept getting longer and longer, they had me kiss my baby as we disembarked so they could intabate him and place him in a burst suppression coma.
It was 3 weeks later before he would open his eyes again.
He missed the divisional round, but due to our entire town sending Zie cards, flooding his ICU room, floor to ceiling, the doctors found out about his love for football. And not a single one of the following 4 games that we had on for background noise in the hopes of it waking him up, did we not have doctors and nurses by his side watching with/for him. He wouldn’t know until much later that he turned hundreds of Bronco fans into Chiefs fans by just breathing.
Then the conference round came, the ICU doctors and nurses helped decorate his room football style, watch the games, and planned the extraction of the life support around the two games. It took 3 excruciating weeks to stop his refractory status seizures. January 29th, our blue eyed boy finally woke.
Zie lost his memory, but he didn’t lose a single football stat. He was crushed to know he missed such “vital” games and he used his memory of football and ran with it. Non-stop sports centers, and rewatching games. He made so many friends with the doctors and nurses because of his football knowledge, and his personality. He had to relearn to walk and catch, some speech, swallowing and so on. But he was so determined to throw a football. When someone brought up a memory he couldn’t find, he talked about the Chiefs, when he was taken for more tests, he talked about the Chiefs. When he was scared in the middle of the night, we rewatched the Chiefs games he missed. “CHIEFS, CHIEFS, CHIEFS” he would holler out in the hall, never disappointed by the response he received.
Then came the Super Bowl. His rehab team was able to plan his “free leave day” for that Sunday. He got the Mahomes hair cut, a new Pacheco jersey, and non-hosptial food for the first time. His doctors made a deal with him. If he hit milestones they would allow him to have a Super Bowl party with visitors staying past visiting hours, snacks, and a projector to watch the game on a ‘big screen’.
They all knew that this game was his driving force for recovery, he needed to be able to walk, balance, eat and hold down food for this.
That super bowl win, you would have thought he was Andy Reed, he rode that high and the parade lows as if he was a part of the team.
Two weeks later, he was finally released.
He was diagnosed with a 1 in a million disease called FIRES. Febrile Infection-Related Epilepsy Syndrome, a Brain Injury, and NORSE. New Onset Refractory Status Epilepticus.
He will never be allowed to play football again, but he still joined his middle school team, went to every practice he’s able to and loved cheering them on at games from the side lines.
To us, it’s very simple to see what got him through. Football.
