<p>HeliMomNYC: we had a rather traumatic experience with mono, from which I learned some lessons, and can maybe share with you. Toward the end of my D’s first year of college, she got real sick… bad, bad sore throat, fever, vomiting, and exhausted. She went to her school’s student health center, told them she’d been exposed to mono in her sorority house, and they wouldn’t do the blood test. They did a strep, which came back negative. After their getting my daughter’s permission to talk with them, I called the health center and asked why they wouldn’t test her… their answer, “There’s been a lot of viral stuff going around; that’s probably what she has.” I’m thinking, “Mono IS viral.” Anyway, they wouldn’t do anything, and over the course of a couple of weeks, she got better… just in time for finals, and packing to move back home. Within eight hours of being home, she ended up in my bedroom in the middle of the night crying, saying the same awful sore throat was back (so sore she couldn’t swallow her own saliva, and had to spit in a cup). I sent her to our family physician the next day, they did a blood test, and said she had mono, and that she was probably having a relapse.</p>
<p>As you can imagine, I was furious, and shot off some letters to the health center; of course I never heard back from them. It infuriated me that she’d had mono all that time and despite our pleading with them to test her they wouldn’t. There are lots of precautions they give to kids who get mono, especially as it pertains to ::ahem:: drinking alcohol, and physical activity. Because the liver is more fragile during a bout with mono, any blow or knock to the liver can be dangerous, so people are usually told no physicial activity for at least six weeks. If my daughter had known she had mono the first time around, she would have taken it easy for a much longer period, probably eliminating the chance of relapse when she got home. She spent most of that summer getting over the mono, then fighting other bacterial and viral infections that I’m sure she picked up because her immune system was shot. So she never got a summer job - it was pretty miserable. </p>
<p>Lesson learned on our part: if you feel as if the student health center is being negligent, send your kid to an acute care center or something similar. Since we live 700 miles from her college, and we’d had no reason to question the student health center (they were very attentive when she broke her foot fall semester of her freshman year), we hadn’t done our research ahead of time. By the time she returned for her sophomore year, we had a list of possible doctors/clinics she could go to (that were in our insurance network) if anything similar happened.</p>
<p>Anyway, my daughter’s biggest complaint was the god-awful sore throat, and extreme exhaustion, although she had a decent fever, too; it was fairly manageable alternating Tylenol and ibuprofen. </p>
<p>Interestingly, at this health center, they don’t do rapid strep tests; only 48 hour ones. Our physician’s office does both the rapid and 48 hour one because often the rapid comes up negative (it’s early in the illness), then the 48 hour one comes back positive. So he may still have strep.</p>
<p>With D2 heading off to college for her freshman year in August, I’ve already looked up local acute care centers and clinics in case anything similar happens; she has an occasional (once a year or so) flare-up of asthma that requires a nebulizer treatment (of course, never during regular office hours), so I’m well ahead of the game in telling her where else to go if her symptoms aren’t being taken seriously. She, too, will be 800 miles away from home! So it’s not like I can rush in and take care of her… which in a good way is good. It teaches them both how to manipulate the health care system, and to be assertive with their providers.</p>
<p>I hope your son feels better, soon. There’s not much worse than having a high fever in the summer time!</p>
if his first illness had lasted much longer, or into a critical period like finals.</p>