Quote:
Originally Posted by cecfire
My brother in law was diagnosed with MDS about 4 weeks ago. For the last 13 days, he has been running a high temperature from 102 - 103+ with brief periods recently of being normal. He has been hospitalized for the last 9 days and has been receiving IV antibiotics even though they cannot determine the source of his infection. His platelets even with frequent transfusions remain under 10,000 which could in part be due to the temperature. In the last few days, his liver enzymes have also been elevated and he is jaundiced. They started him on steroids yesterday, but his temperature rose again to 103 and 104 after being pretty low for the last couple of days. He is classified as RAEB 1.5 and his last white count was around 13,000. Has anyone had anything similar and was the cause of the infection determined?
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Yes, my dad went through roughly the same chain of events when he was diagnosed with MDS (RAEB-1) in May this year. Initially he just had a loss of appetite, dry cough and generally feeling sleepy and fatigued after routine physical activities.
Once he had the bone marrow biopsy though, he caught an infection from somewhere and this infection caused a ton of problems. Dad had persistent high grade fever for 3-4 weeks. He was constantly on IV antibiotics, given after every 6-8 hours.
Even after running a battery of tests, nothing could be pinpointed. By this time, my dad has completely lost his appetite and his solid food intake was so low. This, alongwith the constant antibiotics being fed into his system, caused his stomach lining to erode, which caused further loss of appetite and then caused his abdomen to swell up with alot of gas, making it difficult for him to breathe with his lungs being constricted for space.
Long story cut short, once the gas was cleared out, and after finding no conclusive evidence of infection, the doctors went in for a 'blind treatment' of antibiotics for the persistent fever.
It was a 5 day course and the fever simply vanished. It was always a 'fever of unknown origin', causing erratic Hb, WBC and platelet counts. My dad did have platelet transfusions too and the lowest his platelets ever went down was 19K.
Thankfully, eversince, there hasn't been any such repeat episode. I really do hope the doctors can pinpoint the cause of infection soon and help your brother in law recuperate from the bouts of fever.
Take care!