Sorry I've been MIA

Wednesday through Friday have literally been a blur for me. Tuesday night Connor was running around like wild man of Borneo, and fell and whacked his head. What's new, right? Heck, toddlers wear their bruises with pride...so we nursed and went to sleep and thought no more about it. Well, he woke up at 2 am burning up with fever. We gave him some medicine when the store opened at 7 am (no 24 hour quickie marts here!) but the fever never responded well. All day Wednesday it swung wildly between 101 and 104, and then at 4 pm, despite a good dose of Motrin, shot to 104.8. We called the doc and they advised us to hie ourselves to Ft Wainwright for emergency services, especially since he was getting very dehydrated and listless as well.

Just as a sidebar, I have never been taught by experience or word of mouth to respect Army medical care, but they rocked in a serious way. Blew Nellis out of the water by a mile. Anyway...

We had multiple tests for flu and RSV, and nada. He had a megadose of Tylenol and that took the edge off the fever. Finally we had a blood test. It's never good when the med tech pulls up the results and you hear her say, "Whhhhooooa." She ran off to the doc, and the doc came immediately to tell us what was going on.

Our son, the kid who has been sick maybe three times ever, managed to acquire such a wicked virus that it attacked his platelets. That suppressed his platelets to below half of what they should be, thereby compromising his ability to clot. The condition is called thrombocytopenia, and is more commonly seen in cancer patients than in healthy 2 year olds, hence the concern. We were given a follow up appointment for testing, and then warned to keep him quiet and still and watch him for any signs of bleeding. After some internet research, we half concluded that the test was faulty...people with this are usually VERY sick. There is an occurrence of false positives for this, usually in a dehydrated patient who clots too quickly and skews the test. We figured that had to be it, because, hey, he whacked himself good and hard Tuesday night and not even a welt.

We talked ourselves into thinking it was a mistake and today's testing would show this to be a great cosmic joke. Well, nothing doing...turns out the thrombocytopenia is indeed there and is indeed a concern. They did some more testing to try to isolate the virus they think is causing the issue -- apparently there's many including things that he patently doesn't have, like HIV. The doc doesn't think there's any reason to worry about cancers or anemia or autoimmune disease, but does feel it needs to be monitored closely. The good news is the platelets are not that low...not so low that he will start bleeding out of his eyes during a sneeze or anything. But they are low enough that we have to take great care in playing, not allow him to jump and fall more than a few inches, and any bleeding or bruising needs to be treated as an emergency. We have to check him over carefully every day to ensure there's no reason to think his platelets have dropped further.

This sort of thing resolves itself within a few weeks to six months, usually without treatment for the most part. If in a few weeks it doesn't improve or worsens, we'll have to do more extensive and invasive testing to eliminate anything more worrisome and might have to do a short course of steroid therapy. That is not expected to be needed, but eesh.

Connor hardly ever gets sick, but when he does, by God, he does it with a vengeance. It's really hard not to worry.

I wake up every few minutes to check him all night long...maybe someday I'll sleep again.
My poor baby.

ETA: Relief of all reliefs...turns out it's Epstein-Barr virus. That's right...my kid has mono. Can't wait for making out in high school I guess. Mono in kids this young acts nothing like mono apparently and the saliva test doesn't work in most cases to detect it. That explains all the sleeping he was doing before he got acutely sick, and why his appetite has been crap. Thankfully as a result the dr is going to wait another two weeks before testing his blood again, and it's all about watchful waiting. It IS possible for it to become chronic, but it likely won't...and as soon as the infection is inactive, his platelets will likely rebound. The thrombocytopenia is directly attributable to Epstein-Barr, which is quite a nasty little bugger. He had to have caught it 30-50 days ago, which was right in prime traveling mode -- we went to Indiana and back to Vegas, then Vegas to DC and back, then Vegas to Fairbanks. That's a lot to tax a sheltered kid's immune system with, especially with all the jet lag and confusion and stress of a major move. We were asking for this I guess, despite all my attempts to give him the best transition possible. The dr emphasized there's nothing we could have done to prevent this, but I fret anyway. Thank GOODNESS it's not cancer or anything horrid...mono I can deal with.