Need help with understanding blood tests

[momtocole1]

Hi Judy,

 

From your description, I was wondering if you are seeing impetigo or perhaps something more like fever blister or canker sore. Are they like these? http://www.21stcenturydental.com/smith/education/ulcers.htm.

 

Dear Buster,

 

I took a look at the link. No, my son's sores are not canker sores they are not white and not in the mouth. They are on the skin outside of the corners of each side of the mouth or sometimes just on one side. They start out as a perfect circle, right before that he will tell me that the skin is itchy and tingles, then the next day the circle appears. It then starts to become a honey color and has lines across the sore from left to right that almost look like a scratches or scrapes. Sometimes it will ooze a little bit and then crust over. He keeps cracking it open, opening his mouth as wide as he can and it cracks it, then he can't stop licking it. It is so irritating for him. We have tried every cream under the sun, even prescrip. creams, been to dermo doc, steriod cream (not good). The only thing that helps is oral antibiotics. It is like it is a pre-cursor for him for strep. Not sure if it is an indication of a strep infection or does the wound get a strep infection in it because it is an open sore?

Yeast is a pain to get rid of. Numerous folks on this forum have had to address increased yeast infections and perhaps they'll add their comments regarding how to get rid of it.

 

We are starting on some good probiotics.

 

Is you daughter doing well now? Do you have your daughter on high dose antibiotics?

 

If she is, did you notice her refusing to eat while on this high dose? My son has been refusing food quite a bit since he started on the high dose Augmentin. He NEVER refuses food. Not to say that he is not picky. He is very particular about what he eats, likes to eat the same things over and over and over, but he always wants to eat, so it does concern me. He is quite overweight right now, 118 pounds, 12 yrs old next month.

 

In our case, our daughter's OCD directly impacted her ability to eat -- but this was before antibiotics. Our daughter had a fever on Jan 23rd, 2008 and in the following week stopped eating snacks. She had a tooth extraction in Feb and after that her symptoms ramped signficantly such that she was down to eating 1 small meal per day. She had body morphology issues and all the classic symptoms of anorexia nervosa in a 7 year old. Her rationale for not eating was so that if she did eat something "she wouldn't weigh more than 50 lbs". There's a lot to our story, but the short summary is that when she was down 15% we were able to hospitalize her for malnutrition. It was there that we were able to culture her and get blood work and discovered that she had GABHS as did her sister. After Augmentin it was as if a cloud cleared and a part of her came back but it was a fight for the next 3 months as the symptoms came back when we switched from Augmentin to Amoxicillin prophylaxis. It was several months later when we tried azithromycin and on day 9 her symptoms passed.

 

Your poor sweet little girl has been through so much. Does she ever cut her food into tiny little pieces? My niece is doing that. Your daughter is just so little. It is such a road.

 

Over this past year, we've kept her on prophylatic azithromycin. She had many repeat exacerbations when in close contact with GABHS -- in fact we called her our canary because when she starts to ramp, we can take her sister in and she'd be positive for GABHS. We did check her sister for negative cultures 3 weeks after treating to ensure her sister wasn't just a chronic carrier. Exacerbations usually lasted 6 weeks. The issue for us was that she never quite came all the way back and by July this year many of the original symptoms were back. We tried a prednisone burst and this yielded good results for 4 days; however, this was a week after completing the 6 day burst. We did IVIG in August and for the first 2 weeks we were quite worried as things got considerably worse. On week 3, she got substantially better and by now 12 weeks post IVIG she's doing very well. We'll probably keep her on prophylactic antibiotics for quite some time.

 

 

 

 

 

I also read that sometimes they develop a fear of choking on food with PANDAS and that can prevent them from wanting to eat. Does this all sound crazy???

It is crazy. In our case, she did have the full on body morphology issues and drew people funny. It wasn't a fear of choking thing, it was a straight on fear of gaining weight.

 

Part of the reason that he has gained so much weight so fast is that he has given up so much on life, i.e. not going outside, not riding bike. He has become VERY sedentary. Almost always on the computer. He is a genius at it (don't want to sound like a brag). He is hyper-focused/obsessed with everything he does. He does animations on the computer and is even creating commercials. He has lost all his friends. Honestly he has not had very many close friends because he is extremely over-sensitive and takes things very personally.

Friends usually give up. It just breaks my heart.

 

 

Do you think he's depressed? We ended up putting our daughter on SSRIs at an extremely low dose because she had retreated so far into a shell. This was partially because she had no energy from not eating, she also had a pretty severe form of social anxiety, but more than anything else, she was depressed. In our case, it was pretty easy to diagnose as she was making suicidal statements at her doctor's office -- sort of freaked everyone out.

 

Hard to say whether he is just really into computers, needs some escape, is passionate about his work, is hitting puberty or something else is going on. Might be worth raising with your psychiatrist.

 

Yes, I do think that he is depressed, but it seems to be lifting slightly on the new augmentin dose. We have tried SSRI's in the past with disasterous results. He was on such a small dose and he was jumping out of his skin, we found him pacing in front of the house at 4:00 a.m. alone and talking to himself. He would throw himself into his closet doors. It was like he could not handle the up regulation in his brain. He is older now and I have thought but trying again, but I am afraid.

 

Thanks for all your help,

 

Judy..

Regards,

 

Buster

[EAMom]

ps--to my knowledge Buster is not a doctor assigned to our forum--but I could be wrong! maybe EAMom can tell us

 

Not a doctor.