I hope it's ok - I'm purposefully posting this in Parenting and not in Family Safety or Health because it's something that I hope all parents will want to know....
This past Thurs my 20 month old daughter had a fever of 102.2. I called her doc, they asked me lots of questions and told me to go ahead and just give her generic baby tylenol or motrin and make sure she responds appropriately. Gave her the meds, her fever went down, she slept fine. Next morning had 99.6, gave her more, she seemed fine after a few more hours, so I took her to daycare and went to work.
2:30 daycare calls, she's got a fever and is shaking. DH and I take her to Ped, examines her, says she's seeing a lot of this "fever but no other symptoms" virus, and we should take her home and keep giving her the generic tylenol and watch her behavior.
Here is the key bit of info: as we were leaving I asked if there were any other signs we should watch for and the doc mentioned that if she can't bend her head down and touch her chin to her chest, we should call again. This was a new symptom, I'd never been told to watch for that. When we got home I said to DH "We should check that out..." tried lots of tricks to get her to look down, she didn't/wouldn't/couldn't, so we called. Doc said "It's a longshot but because that's a symptom of meningitis you may want to go ahead and take her to hospital" (It's now Fri night).
Long story short, sure enough she had viral meningitis. Which, once they confirm it's viral (and not the apparently much worse form of bacterial meningitis) they don't have treatment for but since you have to keep your kid hydrated and my DD was too sick to want to drink or eat, I was really glad she was on IV fluids for days while we waited to find out which kind she had.
We're still breastfeeding and every other time she's been sick she's continued to breastfeed. This time she apparently felt so poorly, she just used the boob as comfort but hardly ate at all. That's why I was so glad for the IV fluids, don't know how else I would have gotten them into her at home and she started to seem a little better within an hour of being hooked up.
I share all this because now that she's ok I have talked to many people with meningitis stories and many of those stories where the meningitis was undiagnosed/untreated ended up awfully (child died or was permanently damaged - and I don't think it was just the bacterial form that did damage).
There are apparently probably a lot of other times that a kid has viral M and it never gets diagnosed and the child recovers fine, so not saying every single case that doesn't go to the hospital ends badly. But seriously... I would never want to risk it if I knew how bad it could get.
I would NEVER have known about that one symptom, and I could have easily walked out of my Ped's office without hearing that and I don't know how many fever cycles we might have gone through before figuring out something was really wrong. If it had been bacterial, that would have all been KEY time wasted and lost that she could have been getting anti-biotics.
(The way they treat it is they start treatment immed for bacterial because they say - and I believe it - that the risks of those high doses of anti-biotics are far outweighed by the damage done during that wait if it turns out to be bacterial.)
So just wanted to share that symptom and our experience with you because I'm so troubled by how many bad stories I've heard since this happened. It's not to be alarmist, just to share info that turned out to be very important to our child's health.
Take care everyone.
p.s. Sorry if this is really commonly known info and I am one of the few that hadn't heard it. But when I hear so many sad stories of others who didn't know, it seems like maybe I'm not the only one?
This past Thurs my 20 month old daughter had a fever of 102.2. I called her doc, they asked me lots of questions and told me to go ahead and just give her generic baby tylenol or motrin and make sure she responds appropriately. Gave her the meds, her fever went down, she slept fine. Next morning had 99.6, gave her more, she seemed fine after a few more hours, so I took her to daycare and went to work.
2:30 daycare calls, she's got a fever and is shaking. DH and I take her to Ped, examines her, says she's seeing a lot of this "fever but no other symptoms" virus, and we should take her home and keep giving her the generic tylenol and watch her behavior.
Here is the key bit of info: as we were leaving I asked if there were any other signs we should watch for and the doc mentioned that if she can't bend her head down and touch her chin to her chest, we should call again. This was a new symptom, I'd never been told to watch for that. When we got home I said to DH "We should check that out..." tried lots of tricks to get her to look down, she didn't/wouldn't/couldn't, so we called. Doc said "It's a longshot but because that's a symptom of meningitis you may want to go ahead and take her to hospital" (It's now Fri night).
Long story short, sure enough she had viral meningitis. Which, once they confirm it's viral (and not the apparently much worse form of bacterial meningitis) they don't have treatment for but since you have to keep your kid hydrated and my DD was too sick to want to drink or eat, I was really glad she was on IV fluids for days while we waited to find out which kind she had.
We're still breastfeeding and every other time she's been sick she's continued to breastfeed. This time she apparently felt so poorly, she just used the boob as comfort but hardly ate at all. That's why I was so glad for the IV fluids, don't know how else I would have gotten them into her at home and she started to seem a little better within an hour of being hooked up.
I share all this because now that she's ok I have talked to many people with meningitis stories and many of those stories where the meningitis was undiagnosed/untreated ended up awfully (child died or was permanently damaged - and I don't think it was just the bacterial form that did damage).
There are apparently probably a lot of other times that a kid has viral M and it never gets diagnosed and the child recovers fine, so not saying every single case that doesn't go to the hospital ends badly. But seriously... I would never want to risk it if I knew how bad it could get.
I would NEVER have known about that one symptom, and I could have easily walked out of my Ped's office without hearing that and I don't know how many fever cycles we might have gone through before figuring out something was really wrong. If it had been bacterial, that would have all been KEY time wasted and lost that she could have been getting anti-biotics.
(The way they treat it is they start treatment immed for bacterial because they say - and I believe it - that the risks of those high doses of anti-biotics are far outweighed by the damage done during that wait if it turns out to be bacterial.)
So just wanted to share that symptom and our experience with you because I'm so troubled by how many bad stories I've heard since this happened. It's not to be alarmist, just to share info that turned out to be very important to our child's health.
Take care everyone.
p.s. Sorry if this is really commonly known info and I am one of the few that hadn't heard it. But when I hear so many sad stories of others who didn't know, it seems like maybe I'm not the only one?
