Chase Felt Left Out...

Chase started experiencing chest pain at school this afternoon... accompanied by dizziness and some trouble breathing and fatigue. With his prior auto-immune cardiac history it scared him... and us! I raced home to get him and off we went.

After some chest x-rays and a brief exam, they deemed him in no immediate danger, so we're home tonight with no answers. We felt very rushed and are uneasy about some of the things that they said would need looked into:

1) His heart rate is low today... running 55-58. Average for a child his age is 70-90 and his usually runs in the mid to upper 80's. The low heart rate is what is probably causing the fatigue but they didn't know why it's low. This is a new problem for Chase...

2) He is running a fever - 101.4 when I picked him up, 99.6 while we were there. Because Paige is recovering from pneumonia we were hoping the chest x-ray would show he just had the same thing... nope! One of the key markers of his KD being acute is fever... so this is something we'll have to watch. If the fever continues for no other apparent reason he will need to have some labork done to rule out another KD relapse. He's never experienced chest pain with his KD though... so that is reassuring.

3) Because his left 1st and 2nd rib are fused together abnormally (congenital), the chest pain could be "growing pains" where the fusion is twisting and pulling a bit as he grows taller. Today, they felt that the fusion looked "fairly significant". We have to follow up with the specialist that did the CT scans 2 years ago so that they can compare today's chest x-ray with scans from then.

We will be following up with our family doctor, his cardiologist, and the doctor who did the rib scans in the next 3-5 days to look into some of the concerns and get some answers.

As always, Chase is a trooper and just goes with the flow!