Shoved to Them
We still don’t know…
Our chiropractor suggested that Ella might have pandas which is encapsulated strep that can cause nerve issues. (You get exposed to strep, and your immune system fights it off but not all the way. The weak strep finds an out of the way place in your body to burrow in and wait. It builds a shell around itself and sits dormant and multiplying inside the capsule. Just being there can cause muscle weakness. That’s not the most common presentation, but it’s common enough. Got it? Good.) She was exposed to strep about three weeks before the weakness began, so this seems like a possibility.
The thing with pandas is that there is no test for it. The body doesn’t register that it’s fighting an infection because the strep is hiding and dormant, and it’s inside its colorful candy shell so she wouldn’t even test positive for strep. It’s a differential diagnosis kind of thing, which a fancy way to say educated guess. Pandas comes and goes in some people with the symptoms worsening if the immune system gets weak or there is a fresh strep exposure.
All that to say that she seems almost back to her normal self and we don’t know what happened. It was clear that her quad muscles were not firing at all, they would do a jello quiver when she tried to walk or stand and that was all. Today they are. Which leaves us scratching our heads and asking is it pandas? (The treatment for that is 2-12 months of high dose antibiotics, so we don’t want to just try it out and see.) Is she better thanks to our amazing chiropractor? Or is it the extreme elimination diet that our favorite GP has her on? We don’t know.
We do care though. Because if it’s the diet then we need to continue it, clearly. If it’s the chiropractic care, then he needs to be a regular visit in our busy schedule. If it’s pandas then we need to get her started on antibiotics before it happens again, as there was already noticeable atrophy to her quad muscles especially on her left leg. If it’s something else entirely, then how do we prevent it from happening again if we don’t know what happened in the first place?
And I know in my mama heart that this will happen again. It’s just a matter of time. It’s like the arthritis. It’s just another factor in her life that we work with and around. I’m so glad that it’s better, I just wish it had a name.
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