“The doctor said that if Jaxon hadn’t woken up, we’d have a very different situation.”
A 6-year-old boy helped save his mother’s life when she had a seizure in the middle of the night.
Jaxon McDonald, 6, of Racine, Wisconsin, is afraid to sleep alone in his “scary” bunk bed, so at night he curls up with his mother, April McDonald. She allows it, as long as he gets his rest.
Jaxon is a “wildly” active sleeper, a habit that made him a hero in the early morning hours of March 30.
Although McDonald has no recollection of what happened that night, she had four seizures, one of which woke up Jaxon at 3 a.m.
“My son said I was breathing really weirdly, as if I was going to throw up,'” McDonald, 35, tells TODAY.com. “Jaxon ran to get a bowl from the kitchen and woke up his sisters saying, ‘Something is wrong with Mommy.'”
Jaxon later told his mom that she was “breathing like a zombie.”
McDonald’s daughters, Kendra, 14, Morgan, 16, and Lexi, 17, leapt from bed and ran into their mom’s bedroom.
“I am a very light sleeper so they knew something was wrong when Kendra touched my hand and I didn’t move,” she says.
Morgan called 911 while Kendra flew out the front door, running the two-minute distance to her grandmother Charlene Thomas’ house. She pounded on the door and rang the doorbell until there was an answer.
When Thomas and Kendra returned, first responders were there and McDonald was taken to a local hospital, where she had another seizure. She was then transferred to Ascension Columbia St. Mary’s Hospital in Milwaukee.
Doctors discovered a tomato-sized tumor on the frontal lobe of McDonald’s brain, most of which they removed during emergency surgery on March 31.
According to McDonald, the mass was sent to the Mayo Clinic for further testing to rule out brain cancer. McDonald says the only warning signs were a severe migraine in January 2023, for which she was treated with prescription medicine. Later, she had mild headaches that dissipated with over-the-counter pain relief medication.
“The doctor said that if Jaxon hadn’t woken up, we’d have a very different situation,” says McDonald. “The hardest part of this was my children finding me.”
McDonald is very proud of her “caring and observant” son, who sought his “go-to sister” Morgan during the emergency.
Jaxon’s bravery has been rewarded with snacks and toys.
“He loves ice cream,” says McDonald. “I also bought him a ninja spy kit and my mom got him a wallet with the slogan, ‘Don’t touch my wallet,’ which he asked for. He was very excited.”
