An update and question about infectious disease specialist

January 4, 2009

Hi everyone,

This coming Wednesday we're taking our son Ethan to a new dr--an

infectious disease specialist (Dr Mazade in Ft Worth, TX), and I was

wondering if anyone can share any information with me about this kind

of specialist? So far, we've just seen our pediatrician and two

Immunologists, so I don't know how this approach will be different. I

suspect there will be more blood tests in his future!

While I'm asking, I thought I'd share an update of Ethan's situation.

He was 8 last February when he had a bad case of strep. When he became

sick every month after this, for the first few months, I assumed it

was strep again (white spots on throats, chills, high fevers, no

appetite), but every time the tests came back negative. To my

surprise, my concerns were taken seriously, and we saw an Immunologist

who suspected . We did a lot of blood work, but it was all fairly

normal, except for his iron level, IeE (over a thousand, but typical

for a kid with allergies), and an elevated sed rate (27) that came

down between episodes. In August we saw a pediatric immunologist who

didn't think it was because of his age and that is just a

" mystery. " He had a terrible episode on September 13th (while we were

on a 10 hour flight), but since then, hardly anything. He had an

illness in November where his temps were around 102, and then another

illness before Christmas with a low grade fever and patches on his

tonsils. Two days ago, he didn't even have a temperature (highest was

98.8), but he had chills and a white patch on his tonsils.

I do want to mention that based on a atopy patch test he had done a

few years ago, which shows a lot of food sensitivities, we took out

wheat, barely, rye, corn (we took this out 3 years before), and dairy

out of his diet last May and that before all of these most recent

events, we had let his diet slip and he was also especially tired. It

makes me think there might be a connection. I also keep thinking about

that recent post from Heidi about the dr from the NIH who thinks that

some periodic fevers could be precursors of an auto-immune disorder.

My sister has Crohns and I have IBS, so this might make sense for us.

Thanks so much and happy new year!

Ethan, 9 years (fevering since Feb. 08)

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