With some recent events occuring it is time that I update my readers on some things. As you all know, stress has been running rampant in our little world over here. Issues with the county where now it is necessary for me to call them every other week to make sure they do their job and getting my paycheck out on time. Tax stress was really high and usually is every year but thankfully, that is done for another year. Holiday stress and all that comes afterwards just seems to bleed together and send me into a tail spin.
There has been another issue that has been painfully stressful that I have refrained from writing about. Our oldest daughter was sick back in October for a week straight. High fevers, chills, body aches, flu type symptoms. One night during that week she went from a temp of 98.9 all the way up to 104.2 within a half hour resulting in visit to the ER. This was about day 4 of an up/down week of this.
Blood work was done, urine tests run, x-rays on her lungs were done, and throat cultures were run. All came back normal so it just must be some weird virus according to the ER doc. Sent us home with an antibiotic for, well, to fight off anything that may be occurring??? Well, ok.
Since that week, our daughter has been having bouts of fevers, body aches, numbness in her arms and hands, chills, virtually the same symptoms but it has been more sporadic than anything. Some weeks it's two days and the fever comes out of nowhere and she is laid up on the couch in and out of sleep. Other days, usually the day after she is her old bubbly self all over again.
Now, being her mom, I have taken it upon myself to eat off the same fork or drink out of the same cup or can as her when she is in a state of illness simply to see if what she has might get me sick. Call it dumb but it tells me if what she has is some bug or if in fact it's something different.
I have yet to get this sickness nor has anyone else in the house. Being the worry wart that I am, well, 3 1/2 weeks ago we took her in again. She wasn't sick at the time but all the same, had experienced a fever with the same symptoms within the last day. One of many.
The doc did a thorough exam on her and wanted all sorts of blood work done. Poor kid, they must have taken a pint of blood from her arms. For that day, none of her lymph nodes were swollen and nothing obvious stuck out. We had to keep track of her fevers as well as her regular temp, symptoms, etc. And we had to wait for the results of the blood work for at least 2 weeks because the doc was going out of town or something.
We left there and I felt no relief. In fact, I felt more worry. All this time I was really hoping, sadly, that it would be lyme's disease simply to have an answer that was curable, albeit not a great answer but all the same. We got home, and our daughter was tired, pale and wound up getting a 102 fever that evening. I can't imagine the worry that she was hiding from us. Poor kid, not enough to have the stress of teenage stuff but add to it this and she was probably as bad off as Pat and myself.
Pat and I did not speak much about it. Perhaps in our minds we thought that the less we talked the easier it would be to deal with. Or maybe it just is not something that a parent really wants to even allude to, that their child might be sick. Or maybe we were just trying to convince ourselves that everything is just fine, that it was just something in the air with all the weird illness' going around. Either way, it's been weighing heavily on us for quite awhile.
Skip to the last week. For the last week and 1/2 I have been calling the nurses trying to get any sort of answer. I have been just sick to my stomach with all of this even though I tried very hard to put it out of my mind. The most that I could get out of the nurses was that her hemoglobin was fine, no lymes disease, blood counts were good although there was a slight increase in one of them but overall, they didn't know how to determine the results of these tests. I must have called two times last week and then was finally told the doctor would be back on Monday...
Monday comes, no call and I called finally after I just couldn't handle it anymore. Shortly before this, I had a message on our machine from our daughter, she had coughed up some blood that morning on the way to school, she just thought I would want to know. Now settle down, she had a slight cold and cough for about a week and by now, I am convinced that she strained herself. But with my hands shaking, my heart beating out of my chest, and tears forming in my eyes I lost it.
All the stress had finally caved in on me and I cried. I called Pat at work, I told a couple of my daycare parents at work and one of them actually went to pick my daughter up at school for me so that I could be with her even though she was fine, and I placed a call into the nurse to demand that another doc read me those damn results that day.
Pointless to say the least, the doc wouldn't be back until later in the day and the nurse didn't seem all that thrilled about enlisting another doctor to do it. I was completely at a loss...and when my daughter got home the last thing I wanted to do was show her that I was so utterly helpless and worried. We had pulled it off this long, I could do it more.
By 3:00 the doctor still hadn't called so I called again. "Oh yeah, he's standing right here but he's on the phone with another patient, can he call you back". I'm sure that people can imagine the impatience that was building within me. Anyway, the phone rang within 15 minutes and I picked it up even before the first ring finished only to find the nurse on the other end asking if the doctor could call later that night. I had to work that night but said that he could talk to her father about it, which kind of irritated me because the nurse seemed hesitant when that was suggested 3 times by me. Finally I said, let him talk to her dad, he knows very well what's been going on. 'Oh, well, okay."
So, the results. 'Nothing too alarming'. Nothing cancerous, there are some slight increases in her blood work in areas that I cannot even pronounce, but what baffled the doc is that her immune system is turned on and he cannot figure out why. After those results were read, he asked Pat about the fever chart that she was keeping and Pat didn't even get 1/2 way through and the doctor cut him off and said, 'Well, there is definately something going on. And she has had enough fevers to diagnose her with "fever of unknown origin".
So what does this mean? Well, neither Pat nor myself know for sure or feel the least bit comforted to walk into the unknown. Could be nothing, or it could be something, neither of us is really feeling any relief aside from the fact that it's not cancer or diabetes. The doctor is now in the process of setting us up with a pediatrician at the Children's Hospital and we'll go from there. I attempted to look it up on the internet but stopped simply because I didn't want to read anything that would cause my already stressed out self to worry more. So we will await the doctors call once again, although I will be calling him in the morning to find out what, if anything the nurse has done.
The best we can hope is that ... this too shall pass and remain optimistic. But it ain't easy I tell ya.
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