According to her mother, a well-liked child star tragically died after having several heart attacks.
After suffering from excruciating headaches on Wednesday, 11-year-old Millena Brandão was sent to Granjaú General Hospital in São Paulo, Brazil, where she passed away on Friday.
According to her doctor, Brandão, who starred in the Netflix series Sintonia, experienced 13 cardiac arrests between Wednesday and Thursday.
As of Monday, Brandão’s cause of death remained a mystery.
“The doctors still haven’t said what really happened to my daughter and what killed her,” Brandão’s mother, Thays Brandão, told Brazilian news outlet G1.
Millena Brandão has been experiencing headaches, leg discomfort, fatigue, appetite loss, and fainting since April 24.
She went to two state-run hospitals in São Paulo and a city urgent care centre during that time.
Before further testing showed a brain tumour, doctors thought the young model had dengue fever.
Millena Brandão made her acting debut in October 2023 on SBT [Brazilian Television System] and had appeared “A infância de Romeu e Julieta” [Romeo and Juliet’s Childhood] and “A Caverna Encantada [The Enchanted Cave].”
Another mother of a two-year-old daughter, Thays Brandão, expressed doubts about the treatment her daughter received from the doctors.
On April 24, Millena Brandão was seen by a doctor at the state-run Pedreira General Hospital, who diagnosed her with a headache and informed the distraught mother that her kid had “dengue fever.”
“But he didn’t do any tests. He told us to take her back home and give her dipyrone,” Thays said.
Millena Brandão left a modelling event on April 26 because she was experiencing leg pain. She was sent to Pedreira General Hospital, but testing showed no problems, so her mother advised her to stay at home and relax.
The family had intended to attend mass at a nearby church on April 28, but Millena Brandão informed her parents that she was feeling sleepy, had headaches, and had no appetite, so they decided to stay home instead.
After eating dinner at home on April 29, Millena Brandão passed out in the restroom.
After her parents brought her to the Maria Antonieta Urgent Care Facility, tests revealed that she had “a urinary tract infection” and was prescribed medication, although the results were negative for COVID-19, H1N1, and dengue fever.
“She arrived with her unconscious in my husband’s arms. Then, she opened her eyes and regained consciousness,” Thays Brandão recalled.
Her relocation to a state-run medical facility in the state capital, São Paulo, was recommended by staff.
Millena Brandão was crying and grateful for assistance when one of the nurses reprimanded her, according to Thays Brandão’s complaint.
“She told her not to scream, that the pain wouldn’t go away like that,” the mother said.
On the morning of April 29, Millena Brandão was sent to Granjaú General Hospital, where she experienced her first cardiac arrest and was intubated.
“Her lip turned purple. Then they resuscitated her and intubated her. From that day on, she never woke up again,” Thays Brandão said.
Since there was no neurologist on staff, she believed the hospital lacked the necessary personnel to properly care for her daughter.
“They only did a CT scan, and the doctors said they saw a 5-centimeter mass in her brain,” she said. “But they don’t know if this mass was a tumor, a cyst, an edema, a clot … because they couldn’t open her head to see.”
Thays Brandão also questioned why she was not sent to Hospital das Clínicas, where experts are available, by the staff at Maria Antonieta Urgent Care Facility.
“She got worse, with two to three cardiac arrests per day. She had 13 arrests in total. She had never had that before,” she said. “There was one day when she had seven respiratory arrests. Sometimes they gave her massages and other times they gave her shocks [with a device called a defibrillator].”
