Thursday, August 10, 2017

Frustrated: PANDAS Update #7

Streptococcus can suckmycockus, and influence, you're a bitch.

Shit.

We keep taking the 1-2 punch, but we're still standing, bouncing around the ring, trying to fight diseases left and right.

After Drew's ear infection/group F strep debacle, he finished his antibiotics and went right back to Cranky Drew. I had a full bottle of ezithromycin that had yet to be mixed (when you go to the pharmacy as much as we do, they have to give you unmixed bottles of medicine so that it will simply last you the dosage that the doctor prescribes), so I mixed it and gave it to him until it was gone. That was over the period of about 3 weeks. A week after that, his sinus infection came back with a vengeance. Nasty, yellow snot and boogers. The poor kid couldn't breathe, but rather than dope him with more medicine, I prayed to God that his immune system would do the work it needed to, and take it away on it's own.

It has gotten better, but he still has a runny nose. Cue the week before Catherine's tonsils and adenoids surgery, and she flares hardcore on Tuesday. Wednesday, the runny nose shows back up. Fuck me. I am thinking they will postpone the surgery, as she is flaring and her nose is now leaking green, nasty goop, but they don't.

I demand (nicely) that they send the tonsils and adenoids in to be cultured. They do. One and a half weeks post-surgery, the results have come back. Catherine has an overgrowth of provetella oris (not overall bad, but when there is an overgrowth, it causes respiratory illness), and INFLUENZA. Fucking awesome.

But I get ahead of myself, because in the middle of Catherine flaring and going crazy and not sleeping EVER, I start to get run down and overwhelmed with the lack of sleep and taking care of a crazy kid. Monday, I start feeling the drainage down the back of my throat and Tuesday, I have a full-blown sinus infection with a fricken fever.

So I head to the doctor and she swabs me for strep. Guess what? FUCKING STREP. Yes, I have Group A Strep, the same strep that caused Catherine to lose her mind in the first place. Seriously. Can we not catch a fucking break?

Luckily, we, as a family, went to see our general practitioner today so that she could swab all of us. Yes, all of us. I want to know what nasties this family is carrying around. We already know that I am asymptomatic strep (no sore throat, no raging fever etc), and we know Drew is susceptible to strep, and we know that strep has caused Catherine's autoimmune disorder. So, let's start figuring some shit out, shall we?

I will be anxious to see what Drew's culture comes back with. Luckily, in all of this, our general practitioner agrees to start treating Catherine's runny nose with antibiotics OTHER THAN penicillin, and the ENT said the same thing. So now, they will confer, and we will hopefully figure out a badass antibiotic to knock these other co-infections out of the park. Hopefully, we have a somewhat normal Catherine once school starts up, so we don't have so much anxiety and despair when putting our little girl on that bus.

I feel like shit, which is good, because I am not really giving a shit about much. I am not worrying, I am not maniacally researching shit on google. I am just letting it be. So maybe it's a blessing in disguise. Or maybe God is laughing at me. I don't know.

But I do know that we are getting ANSWERS. That's more than we've had before.

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