Last monday my 8-year-old came home from school with a terrible headache. He has never complained of a headache before. He is sparkly, always laughing and running and jumping around. He never needs more than 9 hours sleep a night and is usually bursting with energy and fun.
Anyway, on Monday, after a few hours of really bad headache, which wouldn't go away with Calpol, he went to bed. He woke in the night with a fever of 39.8 and vomitted. I got the night doc out and she said he probably had meningitis caused by a virus.
On Tuesday morning he had a rash, so I took him to hospital, but the rash was caused by vomitting, so even though he was constantly vomitting, they sent him home. To cut a long story short he held down no liquid, and wasn't at all interested in food, for three days, by day three the headaches had subsided, but the GP came to visit him and said he'd be fine the next day (he wasn't). He never suffered from diarrhoea throughout this whole week. By Friday he was sick when I tried to get him to eat food. By saturday he was no longer being sick when eating rice or Rich Tea biscuits. Yesterday he lost control of bowel and bladder. Today he was sick once, but managed to hold down mashed potatoes and roast chicken since.
My primary concerns are that he is now sleeping for 20 hours a day, this hasn't changed all week, and also he says odd things and then corrects himself, and is very wombly and wonky when he walks. He hasn't slept during the day since he was two, and not suffered from toilet accidents since he was three.
Does viral meningitis sometimes set a child back a few years until they get better? Is there anybody out there who has a child who has suffered from these symptoms? I feel as though the doctors were treating me like an over-protective mum, and I am unable to communicate to them just how odd and unusual his physical symptoms are.