PLEASE PRAY FOR KENDI!

Yesterday afternoon Kendi had a bit of a fever. She had vaccinations earlier in the week. I figured that was the deal. By last night her fever had spiked to 104. Hmm.... No other obvious symptoms. Just a high fever. We gave her fever reducer and it broke the fever. She slept well and had no fever this morning. By afternoon she was starting to get a fever again. We just kept watch on it. We knew it was getting to high when she became lethargic. It got up to 104.7 at about 6pm. We gave her fever-reducer then called the doctor on call with our Pediatric Infectious Disease doctor (Arkansas Children's).

He said it wouldn't be do to reaction from one of the vaccinations. It could be just a virus she picked up. When I mentioned that she had suffered with malaria in Ghana, then recurrent malaria popped onto the list.

We finished the phone call with a best guess of Roseola OR recurrent malaria. I was to just keep a close watch on her, especially for fever that isn't being resolved with medicine, small seizures (would be consistent with roseola) or dark/bloody stool (consistent with a serious malarial infection).

We gave her medicine at 6pm. Her fever was slow to come down but it broke.
By 9:30 her fever was raging again. Gave her more medicine.
By 11:30 her fever was down, but not broken, so we gave her more fever reducer.
3:30am she wakes up sort of out of it, calling "need you mommy." I jump down to get her (she's on a palette next to me) and she is burning up. 104.7. We've just given her more medicine.

When a person has recurrent malaria the parasites hide in the liver. The spleen can become enlarged. Hmm.... a few months ago Kendi's liver function tests were scary-bad, and the doc said her spleen was quite enlarged. Could that have been a hint to us? Or was that a separate thing? The numbers went back down to normal and she wasn't sick at that time.

How would her liver and spleen "look" right now? Or maybe it is just Roseola? What I know is that I'm not giving this many more hours before we head to the E.R. I try not to be scared of fevers. I believe a fever is the body's fighting mechanism. I think it's good--to a point. But it scares me when we can't get it down with meds every 2 hours. I think of cerebral malaria. That really scares me.

So please pray for my sweet Baby Kendi. Pray that she grows. Pray that she will want to eat. Pray that she doesn't have recurrent malaria. Pray that her little body will be healed from whatever is going on inside of it. She's too small. She's fought for life her whole first 2.5 years. I don't want her to have to fight here too! She "did her time" having to survive on her own. Now mommy and daddy are here--and our American health system is here--I don't want it to still be hard on her. She deserves a break, this tiny but mighty ball of love and spunk!