Mackenzie

UPDATE!!

We went to see the pediatrician today for our follow up. She has NOT run a fever of more than 99.8 since Saturday at noon. All her tests from Friday are normal. Her temp was 99.7 at the doctor today. He called the rheumatologist at Children's while we were there and had the call on speaker phone so I got to hear and ask questions as I wanted. With all that has been done, since her fever is coming down, we are going to watch her for another week and see him next Tuesday the 10th. If the fever continues on its path to going away, we will just figure she had a bug of some sort and be thankful it went away FINALLY. If the fever comes back, we will go to a head MRI to look at her hypothalamus. For the non-medical people, we have ruled out problems with the car engine, carbuerator, etc but the car is still overheating so we have to check out the thermostat (her hypothalamus). In a car, we check the thermostat first, in people we check in last when we can't find a reason for the overheating. She was thrilled to get to go back to school after missing 3 weeks. Mackenzie said this morning that her "sick had passed away and she was all better now". Let's hope she is right!

(posted to Facebook on Saturday - copied here for the whole story for those not on Facebook)

After lots of posts about things going on and lots of requests for more information on Facebook, I decided that maybe this was the best way to update now and keep updating as we continue this. She began running fevers of 101-102 four weeks ago yesterday. She is also more tired late in the day and has a varying appetite which is unusual for her. No other symptoms at all!

I let it go for about 10 days then I started with our local doctor (Waszkewitz - love, love, love him). After a round of blood work, UA and chest xray with no finidings, he referred us to a pediatrician at Wenatchee Valley Medical Center on January 23.The pediatrician started with repeating some blood work on Wed the 28th in an effort to rule out leukemia and juvenile rheumatoid arthritis by watching her platelet count and her C-reactive protein. Those remain normal. Her alkaline phosphatase continues to be elevated with no good reason. All he mono screens are negative for mono now however she has indication in blood work that she has had it in the past.

Friday the 30th we saw the pediatrician again and he did more blood work (LDH & TORCH screen), another urinalysis, a repeat chest xray and a thorough abdominal ultrasound. I talked to him yesterday the 31st and the LDH is normal (can be elevated in childhood cancers), chesst xray is normal, urinalysis is normal and abdominal ultrasound is normal (no Wilm's tumor, no neoblastoma, no masses, no liver abnormalities, no spleen, kidney or pancreas abnormalities). We are also doing stool cultures to rule out salmonella and ghiardia.

Thanks for your thoughts and prayers and I will update this as we no more information. I tried to answer all of the questions that have been sent but may have inadvertently missed something.

PS - for those who don't know - my mother came up for 10 days to help out through parts of this so that was a HUGE help.