Our son had his first inoculation with hookworm in the beginning of November of 2011. He has been hosting hookworm for eleven months now.
Our son, A, is doing wonderfully. The biggest shock came to us last week after going to the pediatrician for a croupy cough and sore throat. They swabbed him and told us his strep culture was negative. Three days later, they called us to say that his slow culture came back and he was positive for strep.
The shock is because he had PANDAS last year at this time. PANDAS is Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcal Infections. PANDAS is essentially an autoimmune reaction in the brain to the antibodies that the child's body makes against strep. This autoimmune reaction causes inflammation in the brain and nervous system resulting in anxiety and obsessive compulsive behavior. See this linky for more information about PANDAS.
Our son had multiple ear infections in summer of 2011 which set off the PANDAS, which remained after multiple courses of antibiotics, ear surgery and more antibiotics. Many children with this condition get much, much worse if they ever have another strep infection again and they take prophylactic antibiotics for it until adulthood. Our son was on antibiotics until two weeks after being inoculated with hookworm. His PANDAS symptoms were for the most part completely gone six weeks later. We had no idea how another strep infection would affect him, but we assumed it would be very bad news.
Given the nightmare we had gone through with PANDAS the year before which is all too horribly memorable, I am completely blown away. My son had a very active strep infection, was cranking out the antibodies and we were seeing only a very, very minor uptick in his PANDAS symptoms. He was slightly more clingy and starting to go through closets, but none of it was as bad as what we'd experienced-- not by a long shot.
When he had full blown PANDAS from July to November 2011, our life had been turned into hell with his galloping anxiety, titanic amounts of separation anxiety, his obsessive and compulsive destructiveness and renewed sensory issues that were off the charts. He asked me hundreds of times a day,"Mama, are you still here?" sometimes more than two times in one minute. He could not bear for me to walk four feet away from him to throw a piece of trash in a can without him coming with me and holding my hand. He could not go in the bathroom by himself. He couldn't stand to be in our house without the lights on in every room, twenty-four hours per day. He would wake up in the middle of the night with panic attacks that I had left him. He was chewing the sleeves and necklines of his long sleeved shirts and sweaters in October, destroying every single long sleeved shirt and sweater that he owned. He was obsessed with bad things happening, telling us when we were eating outdoors during the summer and the wind blew that it was airplanes with bombs coming from Iraq that would kill us.
This horrible illness was mitigated somewhat by continual administration of antibiotics. The doctor told me had no infection of the ears or tonsils or anywhere else, but the PANDAS raged on from June until mid-November and he was on antibiotics the entire time. At the beginning of November, we went to San Diego. Three weeks later, with no antibiotics, the PANDAS started to wane and amazingly, pretty much completely disappeared by Christmas.
Now, the issue has been that administering the antibiotics would affect the worms negatively, because antibiotics kill the gut microbiota that the worms are living on. And ironically, this has been the case. He is experiencing more anxiety and more separation anxiety as the worms deal with the affect of the antibiotics on the microbiota of his gut. He becomes more symptomatic within an hour of administration of the medication. Today is the last day of amoxicillin, thank goodness. He announced this morning, an hour after getting his dose that he doesn't want to trick-or-treat this year because it's too dangerous. We assured him that it is perfectly safe and are hoping that he will be much better shortly. He is better and better throughout the day, the longer it's been since his previous dose. I'm giving him probiotics to attempt to mitigate the damage, but of course, they cannot undo the affect of taking ten days of amoxicillin. Only time and more probiotics can do that.
But the amount of anxiety he's been dealing with and the amount of separation anxiety he's expressed has been trivial compared to what we dealt with on a daily basis last year. He's going to the bathroom alone. He's not interrogating me as to where I'm going every time I leave a room or take a bag of garbage outside. He's not chewing his shirts until they fall apart. For all of this, we are truly grateful and more than that, astounded.
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