How to Know When a Child’s Flu Turns Serious
The problem for parents is it is so hard to diagnose flu. Flu-like symptoms cover so many illnesses, and no doctor wants you to visit them with a virus they cannot cure and that most people will recover from in about a week.<p>But this statement: &quot;fevers that abate only to flare up again after the child seems to be over the worst of the illness&quot; reminded me of something that happened to my son.<p>When he was 7, he came down with a flu-like illness that lasted a week, and because it was a bad flu season we were told to stay away from the doctor&#x27;s surgery. After about 4 days of fever and no eating my wife railed against the advice and took him along, only to be fobbed off by her regular doctor who said there was nothing to worry about, he had an ear infection, and prescribed some antibiotics.<p>So for the next day or two he seemed to improve. Then, on the Sunday, he suddenly faded away again and seemed to lose all interest in getting better. The only thing he complained about was a perpetual pain in his neck. I took him back to the surgery, and because it was a weekend I saw a visiting doctor rather than our regular one. The guy took one look at him and phoned the hospital, told me to get him there urgently.<p>It transpired he had a very advanced pneumonia, and had to be transferred to a bigger hospital for an operation to remove 1 litre of fluid from his lung. That was what had been causing the neck pain: the sheer weight of the fluid on one side of his chest. After the op, they managed to treat the infection with about the fourth antibiotic they tried (I think there were only a couple left after that, which was scary). Another week later and he went home, and made a full recovery, thankfully.<p>When questioned, our family doctor very defensively said she had never come across such an advanced case of pneumonia in &quot;someone who could still stand up&quot;, and so she had discounted it. This fact seemed to be borne up by the fact that our son was a prize exhibit at the teaching hospital he&#x27;d been transferred to, surrounded on a daily basis by medical students listening through stethoscopes and being told &quot;this is what a pleural empyema sounds like in a child - note the lack of the classic rattling noise you associate with pneumonia&quot; ... so maybe our doctor was correct. Anyway, we were just glad to have our son well again and were not interested in lawsuits.<p>But every time either of our kids gets a fever or anything that seems like the flu now, we play extra close attention and refused to be fobbed off by over-worked doctors.