No tags yet.
On Saturday, October 10th 2015, My 6 year old son Jamie, began complaining that he had a sore throat. My husband and I both have medical backgrounds so we looked him over, made sure there was no temp and decided he was fine with likely the start of a cold.
The next morning, Jamie awoke with the left side of his neck swollen to the size of a softball. I immediately assumed it was a lymph node and became concerned for all the things that can occur with a swollen lymph node, Mono? Could it be...meningitis? He had no other symptoms of a cold at this point(no coughing, draining, sneezing, nothing but the swollen lymph node) and stated his throat no longer hurt, just his neck. I decided I would take him to Medcheck since it was a Sunday and our peds office wouldn’t open until the next day, better safer than sorry we decided.
At the medcheck the nurse practioner looked him over...decided it was some type of bacterial or viral infection and sent us home on the Omnicef antibiotic for 7 days. I was relieved that it was just an infection, stopped at the pharmacy and picked up his antibiotic and went home with hopes the next day he would feel better.
However, by 6pm that Sunday night he spiked a fever of 101.9...so we began the same routine pediatricians tell you to do whenever a child has a fever, begin rotating Tylenol and Motrin. By 11pm and 1 rotation of each med...His fever didn’t feel like it was breaking, so we checked again...103.5. We immediately decided this called for a trip to the ER. Jamie was starting to become lethargic, he wouldn’t talk or walk. When we arrived at the ER, they took him directly back. They started an IV determining he was dehydrated, and drew a rainbow of blood tubes to be tested. A few hours later the doctor came in and told us that everything they tested for was negative. No Strep, No Mono, No flu, they were ruling out meningitis because he didn’t have back pain and nothing made sense to them other than it had to be an oddball virus. They sent us home and told us to continue the omnicef.
Every day after that was the same. He wouldn’t walk, talk, play, smile, his fevers stayed high even rotating the fever reducers and giving him the antibiotic. I made an appointment with his pediatrician for Thursday, October 15th- and I’m so glad I did. That morning when he woke up the whites of his eyes had turned blood red, I assumed for the first couple hours maybe it was from lack of sleep from the past few days...but as the day went on, they became worse with actual blood. When we arrived to his appointment Jamie was still unable to walk, partially from body pain and partially from weakness. When his pediatrician came into the room he instantly recognized that Jamie was very ill. He had never been this sick...nothing more than the common cold and croup when he was an infant. Our ped examined him and then looked at me and my husband... he crossed his arms and asked "And you have been giving him the antibiotic for 5 days now correct?" We replied yes... He then says "I don’t want to scare you...but anytime a child has a fever for 5 days, that isn’t breaking with the fever reducers, and the eyes are blood red...we begin thinking of a disease called Kawasaki...so to be safe, I want you to take him to the children’s hospital so that they can evaluate him and figure out what’s going on. Call me tomorrow and let me know what they say or do for him, and Ill assume that they will likely admit him so do what you need to before going." So we went home and packed a bag, asked my mom to stay with our two year old son while we took Jamie to the children’s hospital 2 hours away from home.
Continued in "It’s a bacterial Infection" blog post
