Monday, 11 March 2013

The Realities of DS

Phoenix recently came down with a cold/flu that hit her hard and lingered around. Two weeks later and she still has a runny nose . It's been a bad cold and flu  season, everywhere. It's even make the news. But this is the sickest that Phoenix has been in her life with high fevers on and off for 7 days. As a mom, this is really concerning. No one wants to see their baby be sick for this long.We made a trip to the family doctor, a trip to urgent care and then a trip to emerge to find out what the hell was going on.

It was a para influenza virus as it turns out. A bad one. The doctors have been seeing the fevers linger and the virus taking a long time to work it's way out of the kids systems.

But as a mom of a kid with DS I have a little bit more to worry about than other moms. Because in our population of kids Leukaemia is 10-20times more likely to develop and the median age of onset is 3-6. Phoenix turns 3 next week. And often the symptoms of leukaemia are similar to that of having a virus: fever, irritability, crying due to bone and muscle pain, and petechiae. Petechiae are small burst blood vessels that come to the top of the skin, and Phoenix had a small patch of this that appeared the week before her virus hit.

I'll admit it, I was worried. I brought her into emerg at the Children's Hospital because I wanted them to run a blood panel to check her blood for blasts. The blood work came back totally normal, so it was a bit of an overreaction on my part. It was great that for once my mommy gut was wrong.

We're still good, and Phoenix has bounced back beautifully. But a little nagging fear remains.

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