My youngest kid (age 15) was diagnosed with glandular fever a few days ago after a week or two of being off-colour. Since then he has had all the classic symptoms…grossly swollen neck, fever, severely oversized tonsils (affecting his breathing at times) as well as feeling terribly tired and sick. He is one very sick little puppy at the moment.
What I wanted to know was whether the severity of the symptoms indicates how long he might be out of commission. Are those who ‘have it bad’ in the acute stage likely to be those who have the virus drag on and on for months? Is there any chance that in a few weeks he will be back to his normal revolting teenage self?
And any other advice you lot can give me regarding how to make his convalescence bearable (both for him AND me ) would be appreciated too.
My flatmate got struck down with glandular fever a few years ago, he was off work for about three months and was pretty miserable the whole time. I’d never heard a full grown man whimpering in pain before (when some nasty stuff was happening to his shoulder). By contrast, my sister found that she had gf after a blood test and had never even noticed.
I’m not sure whether severity is any indication of how long it will take to get over it, at a guess I’d say that severe symptoms probably mean a long convalescence.
As for how to deal with it; make sure you’re particularly scrupulous about making sure no one else in your family gets sick, no sharing cups etc. Boredom will probably be the main problem, books and games might be a good idea.
Glandular fever normally lasts anywhere from 3 weeks to 3 months depending on the severity of the disease so I would imagine this would indicate that if your son is having a terrible time of it, he may take a little longer to recover.
I don’t envy you. My suggestion to keep a 15 year old teenage boy occupied while convalescing would be a laptop, worked for me.
I had glandular fever (actually they didn’t find the antibodies in the test so it formally diagnosed as non-specific viral illness, the timing of the blood tests really matters in getting a firm diagnosis) in grade 10, it dragged on a long time and had a profound effect on my immune system for a couple of years afterwards. I got every cold going around.
Things that helped: I was more alert and energetic in the evenings and my parents accomodated that, making sure I had a chance to get out of the house if I was well enough. (Though we got the stinkeye from a teacher who saw us out once when I hadn’t been to school.) It really helped that my parents listened and paid attention to when I felt well and when I didn’t. (And rushed me to the doctor when I had a particularly bad bout of pain.)
Lots of books and low-energy activities to keep me from dying of boredom, and lots of accomodation of my general lack of energy and poor appetite. Dad particularly made sure that there was always stuff that was appealing for me to eat around the place. I lost a tonne of weight anyway… so maybe watch out for that.
The big thing that didn’t help was people assuming I was malingering. Frankly it’s amazing I didn’t get kept back because I missed a lot of school. Because I was sick. I am still kind of bitter at how teachers especially treated me. It’s really hard when you’ve been stuck in bed for a couple of months and you’re being accused of being slack and lazy. And then, yes, my immune system was knocked about by it and I went through some fairly bleak periods because people thought I was lazy because I couldn’t always be as energetic as they wanted. I wondered if this was what the rest of life was going to be like. But you know, I recovered fine in the long run, just fine. I am perfectly healthy now, I have plenty of energy, and I do just fine. So if your son should happen to have a slow recovery, just make sure that he’s not getting too much grief over it… people can be really stupid and insensitive.
So that’s my advice from the perspective of someone who got it pretty badly, but I do hope that your son has a nice easy run of it and a speedy recovery! With luck you won’t need the advice I gave.
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