Just What Is It?--Updated April 29, 2005

As many of you know, Matthew has had a mystery illness since right after Christmas break including fevers for no reason, extreme fatigue, muscle and joint aches, headaches, and more. After lots of testing and waiting, we think we have discovered the causes :

Lyme Disease - with a standard treatment of 4 to 6 weeks of doxycycline
Postinfectious Glomerulonephritis - caused by untreated strep.

The strep infection has taken over Matthew's kidney filters, thus causing blood and blood cell casts in his urine. The standard treatment is 1000 mg of amoxicillin twice a day for 30 days - that is 10 times the normal dose for 3 times as long.

We were very blessed to find a doctor that had Lymes disease with negative Lyme tests like Matthew as well as Lymes with strep. She knew what to look for and is treating the disease vigorously. In addition to the daily antibiotics, he has also had 2 shots of roseferin and 4 shots of penicillin.

The biggest worry at this point is possible rheumatic fever which is also caused by untreated strep - however, instead of attacking the kidney, it attacks the heart. An EKG shows no damage at this point to his heart.

The strep was found using a test called an ASO titer. The titer of someone who has had strep is usually 40 or above. Matthew's titer was 514. His doctor had never seen such a high number in her 15 years of practice. A retest this week now has his number at 491 - still very high but moving in the right direction.

Another worry was that the terrible bladder/kidney infection earlier on was caused by e coli. This is very atypical in men, so they did some other tests to check out Matthew's bladder and tubing. One of the possible explanations would have been Crohn's disease causing fistulas to attach from the bowel to the bladder. However, the test showed that this was not the case. Since they could find nothing during this testing, they will just assume that the e coli was an anomaly and let it go.

So, until around May 22, Matthew will be on bedrest, taking massive doses of antibiotics - and he still hopes to be well in time to go to Philmont the end of June!