Small patch of what I think is petechiae on DD back. I am spiralling with healt anxiety

[miniworry]

Just noticed this on my daughters back- it doesn't blanch. I have health anxiety and I'm now i'm spiralling it could be something like leukaemia.

No temp, she does bruise easily but not in unknown places really.

Can anyone tell me what I should do next- should I call 111?

I hope your trip to the GP is helpful.

I hope you get it sorted op.

Just been triaged, the kids A&E is very quiet luckily. Confirmed it is a non blanching rash and now need to wait to see the paediatrician. My mind is going to all sorts of places 🥺

Just for perspective, a quick search through public information shows that the OP has started multiple threads within the past 2 years regarding medical emergencies surrounding her children.

March 2024 - Possible meningitis
May 2025 - Suspected sepsis
July 2025 - Infected cyst
Sept 2025 - Suspected melanoma
Oct 2025 - Suspected leukemia

Strangely enough, most of the threads don't mention the past issues that particular child or their sibling had. If your children were hospitalised 5 times in a year, then you must have some sort of common reference point, or simply awareness that this frequency of possibly life-threatening illness isn't normal for otherwise healthy kids.

This is clearly a very unwell woman and all the MN users egging her on to go to hospital for a rash clearly have no idea of the context. I wish OP all the best and hope she takes the route of getting health anxiety treated rather than trying to ruling out serious illnesses in her children.

(To all the medical voyeurs watching this, bear in mind MN pulled a thread last week from a mum who faked a leukaemia diagnosis in her child. It started off with paleness and bruising, then moving very quickly to A&E where something strange was discovered in their bloods. Not saying this specific case isn't real but these threads happen a lot on MN)

I really hope you cancelled the 9.45 appointment op. I also really hope you will get some help for your anxiety.

@User987439 to just put that into perspective- my son did actually have both meningitis and sepsis and to be honest those posts were invaluable in supporting me through those darkest times.

I'm not disputing I have health anxiety and that's why I was open and honest in my thread title, but to say this is a bogus post like the one I followed the other day and was really upset by, it couldn't be further from the truth.

We have been seen by the doctor and they are doing blood tests. My DD is just having the numbing cream put on now. So whilst I do have health anxiety the doctor told me in no uncertain terms I did do the right thing by bringing her in as they worry about a non blanching rash.

Thank you to everyone for your support. I do know I need help for my HA but I also know my mum intuition told me that the non blanching rash in 3 places wasn't ok.

@RosesAndHellebores of course I did- I called them straight away.

We've had the blood test done, now just to wait 1/2 hours for the results. Hoping it's just a viral reaction to her cough and cold as her nose is streaming now.

My husband was utterly useless and had to go outside because he felt funny during the blood tests. He's now gone to work so it's just me and my DD. I feel guilty for putting her through the blood test but I'm so worried they will tell me something is wrong.

Just to update incase anyone stumbles across this thread looking for the same thing in future.

Blood results are back and they are normal. Doctors think the petechiae ok her eyes and back is from coughing (?) and she has a viral infection with some enlarged tonsils. Some throat spray and we are ok our way.

Thank you so much to everyone for listening to ramblings and for those who tolde to seek help, I plan to phone the doctors as soon as I get home this afternoon x

So pleased to hear she's ok. I really hope you are able to get some support with managing your anxiety. It sounds like you've had a rough few years so it's not surprising or in any way your fault, but I'm happy that you're going to try to access help for yourself. I know a lot of people dismiss CBT and it's not a cure all, but I actually found it very helpful.

By the way, I completely understand the double-edged sword that is being told to 'trust your mum instincts'. Fortunately my husband provides a very useful sounding board/sanity check for me in these circumstances - even if yours isn't good with blood tests, do you think he could help you rationalise things? Or is he prone to be anxious too?

That’s great that your DD was seen and diagnosed in less than 3 hours! Which hospital did you go to?

@PocketsAndSedition thank you so much for these kind words. I honestly think those words from the nurses when my DS was in with meningitis were the ones that have stuck with me, but there's a mum intuition and one has obviously been skewed too much in the other direction now. My husband is a great sounding board as he is practically horizontal but I tend to keep a lot of it in. After my DS was discharged it was very
Much a 'but he recovered and he's fine so we move on' attitude from him which was probably my problem.

@Soontobe60 we are in the central midlands and the hospital near us has a 'paeds assessment unit' attached to their main a&e. There's no children's ward attached so they literally just have paeds doctors that assess and test what they can and if children need anymore support they are ambulanced to the children's department of the nearby hospital. Which is what has happened to us twice. It means that often you are seen and tested within an hour or two and it's brilliant for minor injuries too as it doubles as a walk in centre. The children's A&E at the hospital is always over a 6 hour wait!

I’m not denying that OP has health anxiety that needs addressing but that doesn’t change the fact that if genuine, the rash ticked all of the boxes for further investigation and clearly the on call at the hospital was concerned enough to order blood work. My responses may have been coloured by the fact that a young family member was diagnosed with leukaemia, with the presence of a very similar rash as in OP’s photos, but my main point was that had OP not mentioned the health anxiety, the responses here would have been different.

@miniworry my husband has known me for 20 years and we've seen each other through a fair bit which probably helps, but in recent years I have been able to have some very open conversations with him about this and it has helped enormously. He understands that dismissing things/just saying 'it'll be ok' isn't helpful, but instead allowing me to voice my concerns and work logically through a sort of risk assessment is extremely valuable. Plus using my CBT techniques.

My mum has anxiety. So does her sister, and my sister, and our grandmother did as well. All rooted in traumatic experiences and all very understandable, but I am determined to do everything I can to reduce the chances my kids will suffer too! Who knows, we might all have a genetic predisposition to it, so all I can do is try to shape their environment by trying to manage my own reactions.

Lots of love to you in navigating this.

@Rosscameasdoody your advice was spot on and so helpful so thank you from the bottom of my heart. The doctor said they always want to see a child with a non blanching rash without a mechanical cause (eg a fall) so they can rule everything out. Thanks for seeing past the HA xx

@miniworry - I'm glad she's been checked over and that it's nothing serious.

@miniworry I'm glad you followed your instincts. I also have health anxiety (fairly well managed by paroxetine) and I had a similar situation at the beginning of summer. 10 year old ds had a viral infection of some kind with a mild fever and was hanging out at home with me on the sofa when I noticed he had a non-blanching rash on his chest, back, arms, hands and feet. My stomach fell through the floor and I took him to urgent care. The doctor sent us to the hospital for bloodwork, which revealed he had low platelets and white cells. They wouldn't rule out leukemia when I mentioned it, and we had to return a few days later for repeat bloodwork. Thank God his blood count had returned to normal on repeat testing and I was told throughout the whole ordeal that petechiae was a relatively common side effect of a viral infection.. It was one of the scariest times of my life, and my imagination totally ran away with me during the waiting period. Like you, a lot of my health anxiety is driven by the 'What if's", but I have found counselling to be really helpful, and I am usually able to keep my worries in proportion. Still sucks though.

It's great to hear that you are getting therapy (oh no, you aren't)
It's great to hear you took on board the advice from posters that this is a minor bruise don't worry about it (actually you didn't)

Instead you've seized on the msg you got from A&E about them wanting to see every child with a non-blanching rash (was it really "a rash"?)

So you fed the anxiety monster and it will get bigger like all fed monsters.

You get to decide if your actions were helpful to anyone.

Every other poster on this thread is being "nice" and that didn't stop you feeding the monster. I can't feed bad for being the one "not nice" person who tried a different strategy.

If you go to CBT they will talk about how your beliefs may have led to your illness. You'd have to decide which beliefs to challenge and it would be difficult because some part of you will be convinced that those beliefs are important to keep. Not unreasonable for me or anyone to say that unhelpful beliefs often fuel mental illness and unhappiness in general.

Awful post. Did you not pick up on the fact that there was, in fact a medical issue with OP’s DD causing the rash ? And speaking as someone who has a young family member with blood cancer which presented as a very similar rash with other mild symptoms, why in the name of god would you be castigating a mother who checked something out, which, if serious, would have had a much better chance of a successful outcome than if left ? And which the NHS has guidelines for reporting - and for which DD’s rash ticked all the boxes ?

My DH died several years ago from lung cancer. He had severe shoulder pain for months before he was hospitalised. I had heard it could be down to a rare lung cancer but people, including medics, were assuring us it was so rare as to be negligible. I was accused of overthinking. Guess what ? He had it. And he died four weeks after diagnosis - had it been picked up on earlier it could possibly have been treated and he would have had more time. If OP hadn’t mentioned health anxiety the advice on here would have been VERY different.

I’ve had experience of medical conditions which present with symptoms very much out of the ordinary OP. So I dont take anything for granted any more and i act on instinct. As I’ve said several times here, if you hadn’t mentioned health anxiety the advice here would have been very different. I’m glad it turned out to be nothing serious and I would reiterate to anyone reading this thread that if you have similar concerns you are not wasting your GP’s time - better diagnosed early and easily treated, than waiting until it’s a serious concern.

Why ?

For future reference OP, this was the petechial rash DC had when he had ITP (dangerously low platelets). You can see the blood pooled around his ankle and a tiny bug bite as well.

This pic was taken after a couple of days of treatment when the rash was starting to fade.

I don't think it would have been different advice. A non-blanching rash is a late sign, sometimes never even happening. For a non-blanching rash to skip from shoulders to eyes is very atypical. The OP reported that her child was eating, talking, and breathing completely normally. Sick children look sick.

The fact that bloods were done is not a sign that there was a real cause for concern. A doctor would be mad not to run bloods if a parent states they are concerned about a serious illness and there is even a hint of something.

Im shocked by some of these posters, rather nonchalantly saying OP needs to sort her anxiety, instead of focusing on the health issue at hand. @miniworry I have a lot of experience with petechial rashes; my DS would get them ALL THE TIME when he was little, and every time, we had to go to A&E for a blood test. The medics drilled it into us that we should never, EVER, ignore a non blanching rash. You did the right thing by getting your child seen.

Please please follow your gut - not to these “medically clued up” posters on here, telling you it was nothing. If it was nothing, the hospital wouldn’t have admitted your child.

Hugs x