Wednesday, February 7, 2018

Some help please: How do I best fight neurological fevers?

From "Best personal cooling devices" here
This is a plea to anybody who has grappled with central/neurological fevers in an epileptic. I'd love to hear how you tackled them.

C. has had them periodically for about a decade.. But in the past week they have become significantly more perturbing. They occur at least once a day and don't respond to the 400 mg.of Advil which previously zapped the fever and the concomitant seizures within minutes.

I've spent one to one and a half hours sponging her down with wet cloths before the seizures abate.

Googling didn't contribute much. First it alarmed me with this line:
"[Central] Fever is also associated with poor prognosis in patients with stroke and brain injury"
I did learn that such fevers are generally unresponsive to antipyretics so Advil's inefficacy is standard. And also that "surface or intravascular cooling devices" are recommended. I had never heard of such devices so I found this: "Comparison of Two Surface Cooling Devices for Temperature Management in a Neurocritical Care Unit", [Ther Hypothermia Temp Manag. 2017]

C. in the grip of a central fever a few nights ago
So I'm now off to the pharmacy to search for one.

As for for input from C.'s doctors: when she was hospitalized 2 months ago, we mentioned her fevers repeatedly to the treating team. They were all utterly uninterested in the symptom. In fact one of them averred that the seizures were probably triggering the fever rather than vice versa.

Of course, I know that's not the case. C. does seize at times without any fever. And, once her fever is lowered, she stops seizing. So it's really a no-brainer.

3 comments:

Elizabeth said...

That's really weird. Sophie used to run fevers when she was very, very young. We thought at the time it was the drug she was on -- the weird thing about Sophie is that when she runs a fever she STOPS SEIZING.

The Sound of the Silent said...

Yes, that is weird. I guess it highlights the confounding and unpredictable nature of this horrible refractory epilepsy. And the medical establishment doesn't seem any closer to understanding and curing it than it was when our girls had their first seizures.

Elizabeth said...

Exactly. I had this out of body experience today when I read about a dissolvable version of clobazam -- like an LSD tab or something. All I could think was, "why?" Why are there advancements like this but not in the things that really count? We get a new version of a drug that doesn't work? Shit.