Just a quick update on Idan’s strange cold symptoms. He has had a cough since the weekend. It is most pronounced at night. During the day he seems totally fine with just a few coughs here and there. Monday morning they did nasal and throat swabs for viruses and all came back negative. Monday night, he spent the whole night coughing and then was fine during the day. So on Tuesday morning we did an X-ray to make sure there wasn’t something else going on and the X-ray was clear as well.
The BMT team thinks this is probably a respiratory virus (notwithstanding the viral panel coming back negative, which only means he doesn’t have a virus they can test for), so we are in isolation until his symptoms go away. This means Idan has to wear a mask when he goes into the clinic and to the hospital for tests. The purpose of the mask is to alert other immune compromised patients to the fact that Idan has a virus of some sort and to steer clear (we have avoided people with masks and appreciate this system very much!). As it happens, Seattle is one of the few centers that does not require its immune compromised patients to wear masks all the time, only requiring it when the patient has a respiratory virus. It was not easy convincing Idan to wear the mask, which, if you’ve ever worn a mask before you would understand why. We tried to explain to him how easy he had it compared to all the other transplant kids out there who always have to wear the mask. But that logic dos not work so much for him. What did work was the epidemiological explanation of how the virus might spread, and how we do not want to get anyone else sick at clinic. I guess we need to know our audience 🙂
The BMT team thinks that this virus will either go away soon or present itself (get worse or give Idan a fever). First sign of fever we will get admitted to the hospital again for a few days, so hoping it does not come to that. Hoping it goes away and does not get any worse.