My son got home Wednesday and we had the follow up appointment (by video call) with our pediatrician today. The official diagnosis from the hospital is the inflammatory syndrome. He never tested positive for coronavirus, but a third of the young people with it don't either. We were very lucky, we brought him in before it was severe (although a fever of 104 and other serious symptoms) and they aggressively treated him. Because my family is still in NY, they were very aware of what was happening downstate and working with the state health department. Fingers crossed his blood work will continue to improve. What parent would want to expose their loved ones to this? As the pediatrician told my wife, with the inflammatory syndrome, treating children just got a lot harder. They get fevers all the time and standard practice is mostly to let them run their course. How do you now distinguish those common causes of fever from this much more serious syndrome at the earlier stages? We are going to risk this so people can crowd into bars, get tattoos and sing at church?**My daughter complained of a vague discomfort with no distinct symptoms. We didn’t worry, but it bothered her enough that I went with her to a “Redi-Clinic” in the grocery store, the kind of place you go for an annoying cough. It was Sunday, and we didn’t think it really serious, certainly not worth the hospital just across the freeway. We figured she was tired; we figured she was stressed; we figured it really couldn't be anything serious.
The nurse at the clinic did, and urged her to go to the ER for a better evaluation. There is another clinic near the grocery store, one with more medical facilities, one virtually an ER but with far less waiting; so after hesitating, we went there.
Within 10 minutes the Dr. had called me back to the exam room and told me, away from my daughter, that he had called an ambulance to take her to the hospital just across the freeway. The hospital was waiting to begin treatment immediately. She had a blood clot in each lung, and if either broke loose they could kill her within minutes. She needed monitored care, and blood thinners, and paramedics with her until she was delivered to the hospital ER no more than 5 minutes away. My heart still freezes when I think about it.
She spent several days in the hospital. It turns out she has a rare genetic condition which leads to blood clots, one that makes her doubly susceptible. Blood clots run in her mother’s family, but my daughter’s situation is more rare, and more serious. As she puts it now, she "won" the genetic lottery.
I say this because an expert on PBS Newshour Friday evening said the inflammatory syndrome connected to coronavirus is rare. It’s comforting, but at the same time, not. The virus causes blood clots, too, so I worry for my wife and my daughter. Statistics are comforting, but none of us are statistics. What is “rare” is only valuable in the abstract. What is happening to you is more important than what might never happen. We cannot fall into the comforting lie that as long as it’s someone else and not me, it doesn’t really matter. That this inflammatory syndrome is rare is not comforting in a disease that obliterates lungs*, causes strokes, has killed almost 88,000 in this country alone. If my daughter was still of school age, exposing her at all is not a risk I would take. When that doctor told me my daughter could die in the next hour, I realized again you never know when the worst could happen. That it is rare doesn’t mean it didn’t just happen to you.
Young, healthy Americans like me are getting very, very sick from the coronavirus. https://t.co/GvFUIpV2VF— Mara Gay (@MaraGay) May 14, 2020
*Local news reported on a hospital handling covid-19 cases, and in the story showed a chest X-ray of a patient. One-half of one lobe of a lung was entirely missing, destroyed by covid-19. This ain't the flu.
**For you, I hope the news continues to be good. God be with you, and with your family.
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