I didn’t realize meningitis could present this way. I thought the pt would have a stiff and painful neck? Also, for these cases…do you need to follow up with meds to prevent you from catching it? I remember the ED staff doing that when they felt they were exposed.

Meningitis is so frightening. When I work for SCARC…one of our residents was there because she contracted the disease and was left with permanent brain damage.

I think we live in an imperfect world and sometimes all we can do is our best…but still it’s not enough. The important thing is to learn from it. These kinds of events hopefully don’t happen in vane, but rather…serve to teach us so that we can then better help others as well as ourselves.

We never know who is traveling through our blogs and hopefully posts like this are helping someone passing through who very much needs to here your words.

Thank you for sharing this heartfelt post.

This time we went across town to the other hospital and the ER doc there knew something serious was going on. He told us “Kids use to die of this before antibiotics were invented.” I had no clue what he was even talking about. He called in a specialist and our son was admitted and placed on high dose IV antibiotics.

The bottom line is he had a serious sinus infection and it was explained to us that this sinus passage drains right beside the brain, which would cause meningitis if it spread to the brain. The fight was on to keep that from happening. It would be 6 days before we knew he was out of danger. I can’t even tell you how scared we were during this time.

I also did not blame the other ER docs. They had done what they thought was right. But, I knew my child was in far to much pain for a URI. I know it gave me a whole new respect for the term “sinus infection”. I never knew, before then, that they could be so dangerous. It still makes me ill when I think about what could have happened to him 30 years ago.

The bottom line is that we learn most from the hard things that happen. For me to point out the silver lining is in no way denying the dark cloud (which is far bigger than the silver lining, by the way). You must learn from this kind of thing. If you don’t, you are going to be a very bad doctor.

If payment for services in any field were held back because the person doing the service learned something while doing it, no one could ever get paid.

My own kids have probably had eardrums that looked very much like that child’s. The thing is, with the learning I have about ears and fevers right now, I probably wouldn’t take a feverish, grumpy kid in for several days. Unless there was something odd. I hope if I ever need to, I can pick up on the odd.

Anyway, when I first read this, I was going to say: that is one of the reasons I’m not in medicine. Thank you all for putting your psyches on the line to serve us.

If you expect doctors to make correct diagnoses 100% of the time, even in the early stages of illness, then you are expecting too much.