Mercy ER’s rapid response helps save 12-Year-Old with rare, previously undiagnosed disease

The symptoms were initially typical and inconsistent, but after her unusually defiant behavior landed her in Mercy’s Emergency Room, 12-year-old Payten Stout was fighting for her life.

“It all started with Mercy,” explained the Marengo middle-schooler’s mother, Rhonda Goodman. “If they wouldn’t have done what they did, it would have been over. We’ll never be able to thank them.”

In the fall of 2024 into the winter of 2025, Rhonda noticed Payten was experiencing her usual seasonal allergies and random bloody noses.

“Every now and then, she said it was hard to breathe,” Rhonda said. “[Payten would say,] ‘I feel like an elephant is sitting on my chest.’ Other days, she was just fine.”

Occasionally, Payten also looked pale and developed an intermittent, frog-like cough. On Sunday, April 13, she went to church for her confirmation. But the next night, Payten started arguing with Rhonda and later threw up – but she didn’t tell her family right away, or that the vomit was bloody.

On Tuesday, April 15, Payten stayed home sick from school as Rhonda ran errands. When Rhonda returned, Payten was again pale and hallucinating, but she refused to take her allergy medicine or go to the doctor.

“I said, ‘We’re going into Mercy,’” Rhonda said. “She didn’t want to go because she thought she was going to get a shot. She was getting more and more agitated. I went to pick her up and she went dead weight on me. I struggled to get her up. She started swinging. I’m wondering where this is coming from. It got more and more intense – just out-of-nowhere behavior.”

With the help of her fiance, Brian Mattison, Rhonda got Payten in the car and to Mercy’s downtown Cedar Rapids Emergency Room, where she was immediately taken into triage.

“They checked her oxygen and it was in the low 50s; they’re all looking at each other,” Rhonda said. “All of the sudden, I hear things are going to be happening fast.”

Mercy’s ER team rushed Payten to a trauma room. She had hemorrhaged in her lungs.

“[Social Worker] Jessica [Wirtjes] asked if I wanted a chaplain, ‘Your daughter is really sick.’ I had no clue she was sick.”

When Rhonda and Brian saw Payten, she sweetly said, “Hi, mama.” Her primary nurse, CJ Johnson, RN, BSN, CCP, said they could hold her hand as they worked to place an IV in her wrist.

Then, Emergency Physician Matthew Kemp, MD, broke the news:

“Dr. Kemp said we need to transfer her to the children’s hospital,” Rhonda remembered. “We didn’t want to go – this is our hospital. We didn’t want to leave. My heart sunk. Payten asked, ‘Mom, am I going to die?’ I said, ‘You’re not going to die.’”

The plan was to transport Payten by ambulance. Mercy Chaplain Shuji Moriichi, MA, MDiv, BCC, called the family’s pastor and the ER nurses volunteered to call her school.

However, when Rhonda and Brian went back in for an update, Payten was continuing to decline.

“At some point, I hear that the helicopter is getting ready to land,” Rhonda shared. “They said, ‘She’s gotta go. We need to get her there quick.’”

Mercy’s team worked swiftly. Payten needed a breathing tube, donor blood and a catheter.

“There’s so many people in this room,” Rhonda remembers. “I’m so overwhelmed. I asked the chaplain to pray over her … [I] looked down at the catheter bag and there was blood. I could feel in the room that something was seriously wrong.”

As Rhonda and Brian prepared to depart, Jessica gave her a stuffed puppy dog for Payten – a gift from the staff – and Shuji placed in her hand a comfort cross (a small, hand-carved, wooden cross made by a Mercy volunteer).

The diagnosis: ANCA-Associated Vasculitis, a rare autoimmune disease.

“Had Mercy not acted the way they did and how they did, she wouldn’t be here today,” Rhonda said. “It took a village to save her life, but Mercy was that first step in realizing that something was very wrong and we need to get this kid out of here. To make that call and switch from ambulance to air care … because once she was in air, she was deteriorating even more. Everybody at Mercy was fighting to save her. We couldn’t have had better care from the start to the finish.”

Later, Rhonda returned to thank the Mercy ER staff. It was then that she learned more about Payten’s suspicious behavior.

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“The fighting wasn’t her; she wasn’t getting oxygen to her brain,” a Mercy staff member explained that day. “They said she won’t remember. I got a cellphone number to send updates. [They told me that] CJ asks about Payten every single shift: ‘Have we heard anything on that 12-year-old girl?’ For him to care that much means more than the world to me.”

Payten started waking up a few weeks later. She had to relearn how to walk, talk, drink and write. Though the full outcome remains unknown, she celebrated her 13th birthday in June – a moment her family once feared wouldn’t come.

Rhonda put it best: “She is resilient and definitely a miracle!”