Foreword:
The doctors and nurses involved were lovely of the highest degree.
The summary:
Dengue fever does a fair bit of damage even to healthy adults, hence our anxiety over our 11 months old baby girl.
Three trips were made to the public Polyclinic on Friday, Saturday and Monday, during which two blood tests and one urine test were conducted. The consecutive blood tests detected dropping white blood cell and platelet count. Hence, we were recommended to take our girl to the hospital A&E department.
At 11 months old, darling was preliminarily deemed unsuitable at the Polyclinic for the dengue test because she weighed below 10kg. The test was administered nonetheless at A&E.
Darling tested negative however she wasn’t 100% in the clear. As informed by a doctor at the clinic prior to the hospital trip, she had fever that subsided followed by a rash outbreak, apparently a classic dengue symptom. The doctor at the hospital corroborated that the rashes on our girl’s face looked like rashes from dengue.
There was an off chance that our darling was caught between the swing of two phases. Basically, in the first phase, certain proteins will be present only to disappear, giving way to a second phase where other proteins are present.
Darling tested negative for all the proteins in the two phases. So there was a slim chance she was administered the test right in between the two phases, in view of the classic fever and rash symptoms.
The one and only advise from our experience:
Stick to doctors’ advice and instructions closely.
Fever
Friday: our darling’s night feed at 3am on Friday morning was the first time we recorded her 39.1 degrees fever. As it was above 38.5 degrees Celsius, we fed her the cherry flavoured paracetamol syrup.
It would probably be less worrying if not for these mosquito bites she got the day before:
Four bites in total.
Hence, we brought our girl to the public Polyclinic that afternoon.
Blood test & urine test
Friday: the doctor whom we were allocated advised us to monitor our girl’s fever as it was barely 12 hours since she developed it.
Furthermore, our daughter seemed sufficiently healthy with the following signs or rather a lack of them:
- her fever hadn’t hit 40 degrees
- she was as active as she usually is on regular days
- her appetite hadn’t decreased and she was still passing motion
- there was no blood in her stool and urine and her gums weren’t bleeding
Hence, while dengue wasn’t ruled out, it was still too early to advise us to admit our daughter into the Accident & Emergency department at a public hospital for the dengue test.
Indications for sending to AnE
The main worry for this particular bout of fever was the dengue fever, which can only be tested for at AnE.
Hence, in the absence of any other tests, our doctor had written and drawn the following as a general guideline:
A quick note on temperature: according to our doctor, a classic sign of dengue infection is the development of rashes even as the fever starts to subside (which is deceptive as I will describe further down) from between the 2nd day to the 5th day.
The last of the consultation was an order for a blood test and a urine test (in case the fever was the result of urinary tract infection), the following day on Saturday.
Low white blood cell and platelet count
Saturday: by the time we had returned to the Polyclinic on Saturday, we had a fairly detailed record of our daughter’s temperature.
The urine test had turned up negative which meant that she was clear of UTI.
The white blood cell and platelet counts were low, however, and it was conclusive of a viral infection of sorts but not specifically dengue.
Fever subsided but rashes appeared
Sunday: even though darling’s fever had clearly subsided though still present, and we took her off her paracetamol, rashes started appearing. By Monday, her skin looked like this:
To recap that which is of importance, despite the signs and symptoms we still do not know if girl was suffering from dengue fever.
For parents anxious about their little ones, the only way to know was to take the dengue test.
2nd blood test and AnE
Keching 