When it comes to health issues it appears that my daughter is a friggin’ episode of House on account of the fact that she refuses to be a textbook case of – well – anything.

As a newborn, Avery encountered a number of issues including jaundice, thrush, difficulty breastfeeding and colic. Any one of those could have been responsible for a baby that cried all the effing time a lot. After six weeks of this we threw up our hands in despair.  We made countless trips to our doctor’s office and three ER visits before we finally got a diagnosis of a raging urinary tract infection. Why was this missed on the previous visits? Because the child never, not once, developed a fever of any kind. Fever being one of the most important indicators of an infection, particularly in a tiny little infant, it takes special threats persistence to get doctors to listen to you when you have a baby that cries a lot but has no fever. She spent two weeks on oral antibiotics was still sick. And still had no fever. A week on IV antibiotics eventually cleared up the infection. But her temperature never went up one fraction of a degree.

In the years following she had her share of ear infections and other illnesses. The only thing that ever caused her to run a fever was teething and an occasional benign virus.  Never the more serious stuff where fever is supposed to indicate a problem.

For the past two weeks the girl has been fighting one hell of a virus with the accompanying fever and other fun but generic cold symptoms. The past week she stopped eating food and after enough days of that some mothers might get a little anxious and rush to the ER make a doctor’s appointment. Both our doctor and his supervisor examined her thoroughly. One of their first questions was if strep had been going around at school. But upon examining her throat they found very little redness and swelling and she insisted her throat was not sore. Those symptoms being the major indicators of strep, both doctors agreed she likely didn’t have it. After ruling out a variety of other illnesses they declared her healthy and suffering from a nasty virus. But just to be sure, they ran the swab and test for strep. 

She tested positive.

All of us were baffled but sure enough, after a couple of doses of antibiotics she’s well on her way to being her energetic and ravenous self.  Awesome. So next time I’ll just ask for a team of top-notch diagnosticians to examine and test my daughter and her mysterious-illnesses-that-turn-out-to-be-straightforward-problems-with-unusual-presentations.