fever on demand?

[Shenandoah]

I swear my 4.5 year old daughter can run a fever on demand. Anytime she doesn't want to do something, or Daddy goes out of town for a day or two on business, or her brothers are getting more attention for a day because of something special (birthday maybe).

Today and yesterday evening she has 101-102 temp. With tylenol it disappears entirely. I should try a placebo. She has NO other symptoms. And she's complaining about going to school. The baby has an ear infection and Daddy is out of town until tomorrow. Perfect timing on her part. Coincidentally, her 2.5 year old brother is perfectly healthy and she feels well enough to harass him.

Can your kids do this? Tell me it isn't my imagination.

[Corri]

Are you keeping an eye on her while she's got the thermometer? I used to hold the thermometer (mercury, not digital) up to a lightbulb to heat it up and make it look like I had a fever so I could skip school. Held it too close once, though, and burned my tongue when I put it back in my mouth. I was so busted!

If she's not as...er... 'creative' a kid as I was , maybe it's just normal for her to run lots of fevers? DH's first symptom of anything, even when he's not sick, is to run a fever - when he's really tired, when he's just starting to come down with a cold, anything that taxes his immune system slightly. He had a gamma-globulin deficiency when he was a toddler, and this is apparently left over from that.

How do her eyes look? There's a 'sick look' that people seem to get when they're ill, when their eyes glaze over and their skin tone shifts paler. Have you noticed that?

[Shenandoah]

I'm using a digital thermometer. Aside from the fever she's acting completely normal. Ate a good dinner and breakfast, no GI upset, nothing. And this morning when she got dressed I said, "Ok, you can stay home but you'll need to wear play clothes if you are staying home." She's a pink princess and always wants a dress/skirt. So she said she wanted a dress and to go to school. She's there now and no one has called so I guess she's fine.

[pixiesmommy]

I discovered I could do this in middle school when I was depressed and wanted to stay home. I could also make myself vomit beginning in Kindergarten (5 yrs old) without manually gagging myself- just by thinking I wanted to.

So, yes, it *IS* possible.

Manda

[Corri]

>Aside from the fever she's acting completely normal. Ate a good dinner and breakfast, no GI upset, nothing.

Then I'd agree with you and say that she's fine. Some people just run fevers, I think, and unless she's showing other symptoms, I'd roll with how she acts rather than what the thermometer says. Watching how she's feeling/eating/acting will probably give you a lot more clues about how sick she really is than relying on the numbers alone.

[pixiesmommy]

I need to add that my dd runs fevers for "no reason" that can be found for weeks on end sometimes. There are some very scary childhood diseases that are only shown in fever. One is Kawasaki Disease. Another can be Lupus.
These can be tested for in a simple bloodtest. Again, they show no other outward symptoms, so by no means was I saying take it lightly... I just know that it IS possible that it's psychosomatic as well.

Hugs,
Manda

[mlleoiseau]

I just wanted to add that as a child I spiked high fevers totally out of the blue for no apparent reason. The doctors couldn't figure it out. And other than having the fever, I was fine and acting quite normally. Maybe she just gets fevers. Or maybe it's her body's way of dealing with stress.
Good luck!

[lindberg99]

Did she get a lot of fevers as a baby /toddler too? My friend has twins who used to get fevers quite often. She ended up taking them to an infectious diseases doctor who said that some kids will run high fevers out of the blue like that. She said as long as the girls were feeling okay, they could go do whatever. They didn't have anything contagious. I can't remember anything else about it though, other than that her DD's outgrew it by age 7 or so.