Coleman W.

Survivor

My son Coleman -age 4- had a fever for one day of about 101. He quickly got over it. We never even went to the doctor. Fast forward about a week later he was having pain in his left leg. He would walk on it and put pressure on it so I didn’t think too much of it until later that evening when he was screaming in pain. We went to urgent care. They did x-rays and sent us home with a bogus diagnosis of transient synovitis….Told us to treat him with Motrin and Tylenol (They only took x-rays. No blood work. I will always request bloodwork from now on!)

18 hours after urgent care’s bogus diagnosis, we ended up in the Children’s ER. My son developed a high fever (102) and was throwing up and was in so much pain he couldn’t even move. They tested his blood and did cultures when we got there. His white blood count was it 35,000. They immediately started him on IV antibiotics (I don’t remember the first antibiotic he took but they called it the big dog) and said he had sepsis of the blood, but that didn’t explain the horrible pain in his leg. They did an MRI and they found that he had strep A in the muscle tissue in his leg, his knee joint, in his back muscles and two of his vertebrae. Once they found out what was causing the infection they switched his antibiotics. (Sepsis and Group A Strep)

He spent seven days in the hospital …he came home with a PICC line and it eight days of IV antibiotics, followed by 14 days of amoxicillin. It has been a month now. He still has leg pain and is constantly running a low-grade fever. We’ve been back to the ER once and back to his infectious disease doctor three times. They’ve done three more blood draws and say everything’s fine. I guess it’s just repercussions of this nasty infection.

When I read all the stories I realize how lucky we are. We had our head buried in the sand and we were going through this. We had no idea how dangerous it was.

Source: Crystal, Coleman's mother

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