Our 5 year old son has been having reoccurring fevers and sore throats for the past 4 months. He's on #6 right now. They occur ever 3-4 weeks, almost to the point that we can pin point when it's going to happen. The fevers get as high at 103 and last anywhere from 3-5 days. We've taken him to the doctor and get told every time that it's viral, and strep tests always come back negative. We just have a hard time believing it's viral when it happens every 3-4 weeks and it's the exact same thing. Last time this happened they did some minor blood work to check white and red blood cell counts and those came back good. Took him in yesterday and finally convinced our doctor to refer us to an ENT and they are also running a full blood work up on him, which we are going to do this afternoon. My question is has anyone else ran into this? I've read up on periodic fever syndrome, which sounds almost like what we have going on, but it also says that OTC medications don't bring down the fever with it, but OTC medications do bring the fever down with our son, but after it wears off, the fever spikes back up. He's started kindergarten, so now we're missing school due to this.
I'll also mention that he has always been healthy before the first episode, which was Memorial Day weekend and he's healthy during the time between each episode
Although my daughter was "healthy" she had chronic sinusitis in 3rd grade. She missed 37 day of school that year. It turned out she had a low immunity so they gave her another dose of the pneumococcal vaccine and that seemed to fix things. She rarely gets sinus infections now.
I haven't run into this personally, not have I ever heard of it - but that's not to say we haven't had recurring other infection type things. I have kids with ear tubes (reoccurring ear infections), one has allergies (so reoccurring extra fluid, which led to other stuff when it didn't drain well), we had adenoids out, etc. I think you are very wise to try ENT. They will be able to help you. We found that once we saw ENT - they also are working a lot of the time with allergists and other specialities (much more so than a pediatrician does) so if it's related to something else, they will have heard of it. So I think you will be in good hands, if that comforts you.
Once we were into ENT it was quick to figure out the problem.
Don't worry too much about missing school - at that age, it's ok he can catch up - but I know, it's hard not to worry. He'll be ok.
Probably a long shot, but it is possible it is Lyme's disease? Recurrent low grade fever, started after a holiday weekend (possibly spent camping or outdoors?), swollen lymph-nodes causing sore throats . . .
I would be worth doing the test for it I think. Isn't Milan, IL (assuming that is where you live) pretty rural?
Good luck!
Take him to a children's hospital. You need a nutritionist to work with you to help build your child's immunity too. I would absolutely try to get help figuring out this puzzle so that you can lick this thing.
The sounds like my oldest grandson at that age. They did blood work and didn't find anything. It happened for about a year and then stopped. All they could figure out was it was viral and ran its course in a few days. They could get the fever down and keep him hydrated so there wasn't a need to medical intervention.
My son suddenly got sick in Kinder. It was an allergy that kept triggering upper respiratory infections.
He is horribly allergic to dust mites and they had this reading rug that probably came when the school was built like 50 years ago. He was sitting on that and having allergic reactions to it. We have all tile at home so he had never encountered dust mites like that before.
It was our allergist that finally in 1st grade figured it out...it was a long very sick year. Good luck!!
It;'s good your working with a doctor.
My first thought was tonsillitis.
We had our son's tonsils and adenoids out soon as he turned 4 yrs old.
His weren't infected but they had swelled up to the point where they were almost an obstruction and interfering with eating, swallowing, sleeping (poor kid snored something awful).
Having them out was the best thing we ever did.
I'd follow up with an allergist. It could be allergies.
