Mother Knows Best?: Maybe True

My daughter was recently very ill, to the extent that she was hospitalized for her illness. The question I ask is when do you take your doctor's opinion or his diagnosis as gospel. I did not take what my doctor was saying as the bible of all things known. I fought his opinion and it may have just saved my daughter's life.

She had a fever with no other symptoms. I kept bringing her into the doctor's office even though they kept telling me it was just a virus. I knew they were wrong. Her fever was 105. Not a little fever a great big one staring me in the face, telling me that she was very ill. Now, I know that not all high fevers are from something bad, but when it has been 7 days and it still hasn't gone away, there is something wrong. She had every blood test and urine analysis they could throw at her. Nothing was conclusive and the doctor still claimed a virus was doing all this high fever stuff.

I began to give up, thinking they are doctors with many, many years of college education and all that book knowledge, they surely know what they are doing. Then I had my final appointment with her doctor and was told she looked fine and was a healthy kid with the exception of the fever. Wait a minute; this doctor had never seen my child before she became ill. How does he know she looks healthy. She doesn't look like she did before she was ill and she certainly didn't act like she had before she was sick. It came to me in that instance that I was her mother, with her 24 hours a day for her entire life, all 17 months of it.

The doctors sent us to do more testing this time on her poop. I did the testing and went home and mulled over the fact I knew she was steadily getting worse. I decided to take her to the E.R and her doctor's nurse called with labs that came back again ok. I told them we were leaving for the E.R and they told me to just take her to the hospitals pediatric wing her doctor was now going to admit her, which I had repeatedly asked him to do. Not because I wanted to see her miserable but because I knew she was getting dehydrated and worse. When we got there they decided to start from scratch all that blood work was going to be done over.