GOLDTHWAITE (July 16, 2010)—Residents of the Mills County town of Goldthwaite are holding carwashes, selling T-shirts and praying for 3-year-old DerekScott “Bubba” Kirby, who’s in a fight for his young life at Dell Children’s Medical Center in Austin.

Word of the little boy’s plight has spread well beyond the town of 1,800 however, thanks to a Facebook page, Bubba’s Angels, which has several thousand followers.

Bubba contracted E. coli from the floor of a rodeo arena after he ended up with a mouthful of dirt when he was thrown from a sheep during a mutton-busting event.

E. coli infections are serious, but most suffers get better without treatment in five to 10 days.

Bubba didn’t.

Instead, he was one of the 5 to 10 percent of E. coli patients who develop a potentially life-threatening complication, hemolytic uremic syndrome, which develops when E. coli bacteria lodged in the digestive tract make toxins that enter the bloodstream and start to destroy red blood cells.

Since then Bubba’s kidneys have shut down and he has suffered brain damage from a stroke, according to updates on the Facebook page.

He was scheduled for another CAT scan Friday evening to check for bleeding on the brain after his partial paralysis switched sides, according to the latest posting from his mother, Deven Denman.