Triggered by the Flu...

I want to share my family’s story with PANS to help give hope to any other family that might be going through the same thing. My husband and I have a three-year-old son, Grayson. He came down with the flu on February 27. He was pretty sick most of the week, but on Friday, March 3, he was back to his normal self.  We woke up to a living hell on Saturday, March 4. Our sweet boy had literally changed overnight. At first, we just thought that the “threes” that everyone had warned us about had set in. We were doing everything from taking away toys to timeout. We noticed that as the weekend went on, we could not get Grayson to eat or drink pretty much anything. Grayson has always been a pretty picky and light eater, but there have always been things that he would want. He would touch none of those preferred foods. My mother’s instinct told me that something was just not right, even though so many were saying that it was normal for a three year old to have tantrums. These were beyond anything we had ever seen our child do.

I took Grayson to his pediatrician Monday, March 6. Thankfully, we have an amazing pediatrician that takes no chances. She was extremely concerned; she said that any sudden or drastic change in behavior was a cause for concern, especially following an illness. That particular day, our pediatrician had a medical student following her around. The first thing that the medical student said was PANS and PANDAS. I had never heard of either term. We were sent for some lab work, and so ensued the worst week of our lives. Our pediatrician did not want to treat anything until she had the labs back. It was an awful feeling, as a parent, when I looked up what those terms meant. Inflammation on my child’s brain was not what I wanted to see. We watched our child act in ways that are so hard to even think back to. He would get so fixated on particular sounds or things from the OCD onset and all hell would break loose. We have never had a problem putting Grayson in his car seat, but, all of a sudden, the child was terrified of the car seat. It almost took two people to strap him into the seat while he was screaming and kicking and hitting.

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