MIS-C syndrome in children: Indian journalist and author Vir Sanghvi on Tuesday took to Twitter and posted about the current wave of the Pandemic and how it is affecting “young children”.
Sanghvi shared how there are “dangerous complications” among children that even doctors do not expect. Sanghvi shared this “essential” first-person account which is written by Khushnooma Kapadia.
Kapadia says this is an attempt to bring to light the havoc that Multi-system inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) can create. She is a wife of a doctor and has two children — a 16-year-old daughter and an 11-year-old son, both recovered with COVID-19 symptoms. “I am just a mother who got lucky and if knowledge and awareness can save even one child then I will consider it a pay forward,” Kapadia wrote about the emotional breakdown her family went through.
One worrying aspect of this wave of Covid is how young children are not only getting it but how there are dangerous complications that doctors do not expect.
This moving, first person account by a close friend of mine, from her perspective as a mother, is essential reading. pic.twitter.com/G3cpjn0iIF— vir sanghvi (@virsanghvi) May 4, 2021
MIS-C syndrome in children: Calling it an “invisible killer”, Kapadia highlights that MIS-C is an incredibly serious condition that is “directly related to COVID-19 and one that affects children post COVID-19“.
She reveals, “as a family, we have been very vigilant with my daughter” including being excessively careful about not exposing her.” While for her son, who was hard to entirely confine, “I was ready to relax the rules a bit. Play dates within 2-3 boys was ok, a soccer game was 0k, going down in the garden to cycle was 0k, playing with 2-3 of his close friends in the colony was 0k. Today when I look back, I almost got draconian with one but with the other I was ready to let my guard down. Humans are strange, in the middle of a colossal crisis you start exhibiting vulnerability by focusing on the wrong things,” she claims.
What was the diagnosis?
Talking about her son’s diagnosis she said he had developed MIS-C as he had developed severe diarrhoea and vomiting. “If you look it up, Google describes it as rare but dangerous. For a layman like me, it’s a post-COVID complication that affects children and their organs. But really stunned us is he had never had COVID…or so we thought! All reports were consistently showing him to be negative. Completely asymptomatic. Children in certain cases slip into MIS-C 3-4 weeks after COVID. My son was well into it, his body developed a multi-organ inflammation that could affect his vital organs including the heart and the kidneys,” she noted.
If diagnosed with MIS-C, the patient develops fever and inflammation in multiple organs such as the heart, lungs and brain, and according to doctors, in more than 60 percent of cases, it affects the heart.
Treatment
Furthermore, she says, “He was admitted in the hospital immediately. Since then he has been on Intravenous Immunoglobulin, a series of injections, blood thinners, steroids, IV drips, has had to do a 2D ECHO not to mention the complete emotional trauma that a child has gone through. The singular objective was to bring his vitals under control. It took 3 whole days to bring his counts down. A child of 11 can only take so much. We were told that if he would not have been admitted when we did, we would have ‘missed the boat’. And we shall not go to what that ‘boat’ would have been. As a mother, it is hard for me to comprehend let alone articulate.”
“As a mother, it is hard for me to comprehend let alone articulate,” Kapadia mentioned that the media only focuses on adult-related symptoms of COVID-19, while this is something that has gone completely unnoticed with no information or knowledge. “MIS-C is a syndrome,” she sighed.
A new study says that more than 2,000 cases of Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children have been reported in India, according to figures released by the Indian Academy of Paediatrics Intensive Care Chapter in the country. If diagnosed with MIS-C, the patient develops fever and inflammation in multiple organs such as the heart, lungs and brain, and according to doctors, in more than 60 percent of cases, it affects the heart.
