Mother Knows Best?: Maybe True

My daughter was recently very ill, to the extent that she was hospitalized for her illness. The question I ask is when do you take your doctor's opinion or his diagnosis as gospel. I did not take what my doctor was saying as the bible of all things known. I fought his opinion and it may have just saved my daughter's life.

She had a fever with no other symptoms. I kept bringing her into the doctor's office even though they kept telling me it was just a virus. I knew they were wrong. Her fever was 105. Not a little fever a great big one staring me in the face, telling me that she was very ill. Now, I know that not all high fevers are from something bad, but when it has been 7 days and it still hasn't gone away, there is something wrong. She had every blood test and urine analysis they could throw at her. Nothing was conclusive and the doctor still claimed a virus was doing all this high fever stuff.

I began to give up, thinking they are doctors with many, many years of college education and all that book knowledge, they surely know what they are doing. Then I had my final appointment with her doctor and was told she looked fine and was a healthy kid with the exception of the fever. Wait a minute; this doctor had never seen my child before she became ill. How does he know she looks healthy. She doesn't look like she did before she was ill and she certainly didn't act like she had before she was sick. It came to me in that instance that I was her mother, with her 24 hours a day for her entire life, all 17 months of it.

The doctors sent us to do more testing this time on her poop. I did the testing and went home and mulled over the fact I knew she was steadily getting worse. I decided to take her to the E.R and her doctor's nurse called with labs that came back again ok. I told them we were leaving for the E.R and they told me to just take her to the hospitals pediatric wing her doctor was now going to admit her, which I had repeatedly asked him to do. Not because I wanted to see her miserable but because I knew she was getting dehydrated and worse. When we got there they decided to start from scratch all that blood work was going to be done over.

That evening she became even more lethargic than she had been. Results came in she was now extremely anemic and her white blood cells were soaring, she was depleted her sodium and electrolytes. We had gotten her admitted just in time. If we had let it go till morning like the doctor suggested giving it just more time she would have crashed her little body was so depleted that her organs would have surely started to fail.

Still not knowing what was causing this illness, the doctors now knew it most likely was not a virus. They decided to call in the big wigs, contacting pediatric specialist for infectious disease at an area top rate children's hospital. By the way, I had already asked them to contact specialist. When they said it wasn't necessary I emailed every infectious disease specialist at that very same hospital they were now contacting.

They immediately began her on a very strong antibiotic that would cover diseases from ticks, which I had asked the doctor to check for in the beginning of this very long week, which was now going on day 9. Twenty-four hours after they began the antibiotics her white blood count has returned to a more normal range and even though she is still anemic, she has changed in appearance drastically. For short periods she is even playing like she had before the illness.

I may not had received my Doctorate or have gone to many, many years of college, but I have graduated from Mommy U. Knowing your child and being able to read them is ever so important. You may be the only person that can tell if things are normal, better, or even worse. Doctors see them for 15 minutes every couple of months. They cannot account for they're over all appearance because each child is special and different and all react different to illness.

The old saying we all hated as children, "Mother Knows Best", may just be true. Being a mother you know your child better than anyone and you need to trust your own opinion and trust your instincts. If I had given into the "watch and see" methods of our doctors' my child may not have made it out in good condition.

I completely respect the opinions of our doctors' and they did a wonderful job with her diagnosis given its rare and extremely difficult diagnosis, but it took my pushing to get this diagnosis in time before permanent damage was done. I was aggressive in my child's illness and it may have drastically changed the outcome for her.