Reply to Parents of sick babies: always check the neck!

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[quote=Anonymous]Just read a few posts mentioning the tragedy of losing a baby and a couple posts mentioned meningitis losses.  Whenever meningitis comes up I share our experience with a 17 month old who had a fever, clearly felt sick, but had no other symptoms.  We took her to her Ped as we had with many other flus and viruses and heard the same things we always did.  But then our Ped said something I'd never heard before: "Make sure she can move her head up and down.  If she can't move her neck you need to call."

We'd never heard that, so when we got home we tried to get her to look up and down by holding a fave toy above and below.  She wouldn't move her neck.  Then we tried to just move her head and she got upset.  Called Ped again, she said "It's probably nothing but you should take her to the ER because it can be a sign of meningitis."

Of course we freaked but off we went.  The intake nurses rolled their eyes and said "Oh, you new parents! I'm sure she's fine!"  But several blood tests and a spinal tap later and we were told she definitely had meningitis.

We were very lucky, it was viral (the less awful type), but the test for viral vs. bacterial takes up to 4 days so we were in a children's hospital for 4 days while they flooded her with antibiotics, in case it was the worse kind.

We had never heard of a stiff neck being a symptom of this, and are forever grateful to our fab Ped (we miss her since moving to DC!) for noting how extra miserable our DD seemed and throwing in the detail about her neck.

So just passing that on during flu season in case there are parents here who didn't know that.

Stay safe everyone![/quote]

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