Health Updates on my Girls...Fitting Together Puzzle Pieces

Last week was quite a week. 

I was blessed to be able to attend a women's retreat with ladies from our new church home--Chantilly Bible Church--and it was wonderful to get away, get to know some new friends, enjoy crisp fall weather, and hear some teaching from the Word. 

Everything was great...until the text message I received from Tom on Sunday morning, in response to my text to him asking "Are you guys getting ready to go to church?"

His reply: "No.  Lilly had fevers last night. We're staying home."

Gulp.  My heart sank.  Backing up a few days:  Lilly had finished her last round of antibiotics on Tuesday the 15th, just 5 days prior to the fevers beginning. 

"Please Lord, let it be viral.  Please Lord, let it not be the infection still lingering." 

We dosed her with tylenol and motrin round the clock to keep the increasingly higher fevers at bay.  Her pain levels began to increase in all the usual places to the point where we were back on oxycodone and valium to manage it. 

While I was home nursing Lilly, the school nurse called midday Monday to let me know Anna had come to her office feeling nauseous.  This news almost made me feel relieved, thinking that Lilly might also be fighting a viral stomach bug.  After all, she had wretched a litle bit Monday morning after taking some medicine.  Never before have I so wanted my child to show sings of the stomach flu.

So, Anna joined us at home that Monday with one of the bizarre "stomach bugs" that she tends to get now and then.  I say they are bizarre because they do not follow the normal pattern of a 24-hour bug.  Rather than feeling absolutely miserable for 24 hours, having no appetite, and basically keeping nothing down, she feels ill once every 6-8 hours or so, but has an appetite in between and seems pretty normal otherwise.  It's just that pesky throwing up every now and then that means she can't go to school. 

So, as Lilly continued to fever and suffer from pain (with no signs of any other illness...no nausea, no upper respiratory syptoms, no issues with digestion or urination), Anna was home with us for the next 2 days of school.  By Thursday, I thought she was ready to try again and sent her to school.  That was the same day Tom had made arrangements for Lilly to get in for some lab work and chest x-rays to figure out what was going on with her.  So, while I was at Ft. Belvoir's hospital with Lilly, I got another call from Anna's school nurse to let me know she was back in her office, complaining again of nausea.  Tom had to leave work early to go pick up Anna.  Meanwhile, Lilly and I picked up our new prescription of oral antibiotics, the blood work showing that her white counts and other markers for bacterial infection were highly elevated.

Back home again with both my girls on Thursday afternoon, I started connecting some dots with Anna's mystery illnesses.

The last time she suffered from this illness was back in February when Nana was staying with Jared and Anna while Lilly, Tom and I were in Philly for Lilly's initial VEPTR placement surgery.  This was when Anna had also first begun to complain that she had weird "static" and "morse code" noises in her left ear and had trouble hearing out of it.  At the time, I had written off the weird ear issues as just part of whatever her weird viral stomach issues had been and thought it would pass.  The stomach issues did, the tinnitis in the ear did not.

So, as you know if you have been keeping up with us, we have traveled a long road of evaluating Anna's hearing which will culminate in getting her first hearing aid this week (she is SO excited, BTW).  There hasn't been any other episodes of the "bizarre stomach bug" until now.  But there have been recent episodes of dizziness/vertigo, which also required her to come home from school. 

By now, you are probably all wondering why it has taken me so long to connect the dots....

I believe that Anna's bizarre stomach bugs are not at all infectious.  I now believe they are simply another aspect to her inner ear issues, triggering the nausea center of her brain.  Researching unilateral hearing loss in children, I have discovered that often times other symptoms can include dizziness and nausea.  We tried giving her some dramamine at night Thursday night and some Robine Friday morning before school (both anti-emitics that help with motion sickness), and she felt great.  Confirmation.

I hope to discuss this theory with her ENT when we see him this week. 

Lilly, meanwhile, has been on her antibiotics again now for 3 days and has been fever free for over 36 hours now.  Again, confirmation that the infection is still here.  She is still having some pain, especially at night, but hopefully that will also soon subside.

So, both Anna's and Lilly's puzzles are getting pieced together.  I am thankful for answers, even though, in Lilly's case, it raises more difficult questions. 

What to do next?

We hope to consult with Dr. Campbell this week to get his take and discuss some possible solutions to the lingering staphoreous infection.  I won't even begin to discuss what my mama's brain starts to list as possible treatment options...I only pretend to have medical knowledge because I'm married to a doc.  But I have enough knowledge only to be dangerous and/or cause myself worry.  So I won't go there with you.

This morning, I am hopeful that both of my girls will be back to school (Lilly, of course, having missed the entire week last week, is nervous about re-entry) and our lives will have some semblance of routine again, at least for a few days until Thanksgiving break. 

Thanks for sticking with me on this long post.  It was probably written more for me that for you...it helps me to process our crazy lives when I write it all out!