7 year old with sore legs in the night/morning

[geekgirl]

for the last two nights/mornings dd2 has been very unsteady and obviously in pain when walking. Yesterday it sorted itself out after 20 minutes or so, I expect it'll do the same today ...

She'll stagger about crying 'ouch, ouch', hold on to everything within reach, and a few times during the night her legs actually gave way underneath her as she was scampering off back to bed (she gets up several times every night), causing her to fall badly onto her face .

As I said, thankfully she seemed perfectly fine after a little while and school didn't notice anything unusual yesterday.

I'm not sure what to do - she had a brief episode of viral muscular/joint inflammation a while ago (6 weeks ago I think?) which was pretty bad at the time but she was back to normal within a week. She was poorly with something fluey then and it was obviously linked.

The paediatrician said we should let her know if dd2 ever has an episode like this again - I am trying to think of benign causes for this now (growing pains?) because it's only at night/early morning and I'd rather explore other avenues before subjecting dd2 to blood tests again. The last lot were very traumatic, she is difficult to stick and was so beside herself that she peed all over me.

I had the same thing as a child with very painful legs which came in bouts and it was put down to growing pains. Some GPs say it doesn't exist but mine did and it went away all on its own with no treatment.
Perhaps shes about to have a growth spurt.
It didn't last for me and I am now pushing 30 and alls fine.
Haven't even thought about it for years and years.
Food for thought maybe.

This sounds similar to something I suffered with as a child too.

I would get up in the morning and my knees would have completely siezed up and wouldn't move. I had to sit on the floor, put my legs out in front of me and literally force my knees down towards the floor to straighten my legs out. Only then could I actually bend my knees and start moving normally.

Like treehugger, my problems were all put down to growing pains. I have to say that although there are sceptics out there, I can vouch for the existence of growing pains!

I hope your DD starts to feel better soon geekgirl - good luck.

thanks folks - having read your posts and the Wiki description of growing pains, this does indeed sound very similar. Am relieved that's all it seems to be

Don't think I ever had growing pains as such, but I was very prone to leg cramp in the middle of the night when I was a bit older - very unpleasant, too.