Dengue Fever

This past week was quite a scary week for us. Elysia, who is 14 mos. old, got Dengue Fever. If you've never heard of it, you can google it and find out all you want. It is a sickness carried by one specific type of mosquito, and there is no vaccine for it. The only way to try to keep from getting it is to not get bitten by the mosquito and to keep your property free of stagnant water (the breeding grounds for the mosquito). Sunday morning she woke up with a fairly high fever, so I gave her Tylenol and thought it might be teething-related (I think her 1-yr. molars are coming in). Throughout the day, I had to keep giving her Tylenol to keep the fever under control. Monday morning she woke up with high fever once again, and I switched to a stronger fever medication. She didn't seem too bad otherwise, it was just this annoying fever. She only had a slightly runny nose - but that she had from before. So I still wasn't too worried. In the afternoon I noticed a few red spots on her belly, and thought that maybe it was from the other medication I was using, so that night I went back to Tylenol again when I put her to bed. Tuesday, the Tylenol was no longer controlling the fever and by the afternoon her whole torso and back were getting covered in these red spots. By 4pm her fever spiked to 104F (40C). I talked to the pediatrician and she told me to give her the stronger medicine again, that the spots were probably from whatever virus she had, since they weren't raised and itchy (as an allergic reaction would be). So I did and the fever went down, but within about 3 hours it went back up again to 104.4F (40.2C). I talked to my pediatrician again, and she told me to go ahead and take her to the hospital. There, they gave her a shot to bring the fever down, had me give her a bath, and did a blood test. I had to wait an hour and a half for the blood test results, so it was about 10:30 until I got to see the doctor again to show her the test results, and she said that it was most likely that Elysia had Dengue, but we could only be sure after doing another blood test 24 hours later. The only thing to do for it is to keep the fever under control and pump fluids into her system, as dehydration is a huge concern. She did say that according to her blood test, it appeared that she had a simple case of it (I couldn't imagine a bad case!). So by the time I left the hospital, her temp. was down to 100.4F (38C). We got home at 11pm and put her to bed. At midnight, her temp. shot up again to 103.5F (39.7C). I gave her medicine and then 10 min. later she threw up. So I gave her a shower, just letting her play in the water for a while (amazing how much fun she had in the water at midnight with a high fever!) and that really helped to bring her fever down. She slept through the night and then Wednesday morning she had a little bit of a fever again, I gave her medicine, but that was the last of the fever (thank the Lord!). That whole time she never stopped eating, or was overly fussy. But Wednesday, even though she didn't have fever, she wanted to be held all day long and didn't eat or sleep well. They say that Dengue gives terrible body aches and pains and bad headache. A couple of times I noticed that she squealed and hit at her head, so I think she was probably suffering those effects. I gave her Tylenol a couple of times and that seemed to help. By Thursday she was pretty much back to normal and by Friday she was herself again and the spots on her skin were almost completely gone. We did do the 2nd blood test and went to the pediatrician on Thursday afternoon. She said it definitely looks like Dengue, but we're going to do one more test on Monday, which will actually show the Dengue and what strand it was. That test can only be done after 6 days of the start of the sickness, so that's why we couldn't do it before. We are so thankful that it was not a serious case of it and that there are not any long-term effects from it. We just need to be careful with her for the next couple of weeks since her immune system is down, making it easier for her to catch anything else out there. So we would appreciate your continued prayers for health for our family. Here are a couple of pictures of the girls playing in the waiting room of the pediatrician's office.