A message to all parents

Always listen to your child’s symptoms and take them seriously.My son is 6. This is his first year of kindergarten. He was about 4 months in and started complaining of headaches at school. The headaches started escalating from mild to severe. The school did not inform me of these mild headaches, only when they got severe enough to where he was getting sent home. The first two times the school told me they thought he was bluffing to get out of class. So I just watched him closely. I asked him if he was making it up, he said no and I believed him. He was fine all weekend, I made sure he got enough sleep but otherwise acted completely fine. I sent him to school that coming Monday. I got another call that day informing me his headache was so bad he was curled in a ball in a corner and was in a lot of pain. I immediately am concerned and call his pediatrician and they get him in right away. They tell me it’s a sinus pressure issue and prescribe amoxicillin. We get home and he starts throwing up. I insist he needs to go to the hospital. The hospital tells me it’s going to be a 3 hour wait and that we can go somewhere else because it doesn’t sound serious and he just saw his pediatrician. I opt to wait. So we wait and wait and they do a flu test and a strep test and they draw blood. And they tell me he looks perfect. I say I want a scan of his brain and they’re very reluctant but 6 hours later they finally do a cat scan.An hour after his cat scan they are moving us to a different room and I’m immediately alert and asking why as they haven’t given me the results yet. They feed me some vague answer and I go along with it. Eventually the doctor pulls me outside the room and drops the news that will change my life forever. He has a 4cmx4cm mass on his brain. They say he needs an emergency transport to the nearest children’s hospital as it’s putting a lot of pressure on his brain and the fluid in his brain is running out. Not even 12 hours after finding the tumor they’re wheeling him into emergency surgery to relieve the pressure on his brain.It’s been almost two months since that night, but I relive it every single day. They were able to remove the tumor completely and after 6 weeks of waiting, pathology came back as a low grade tumor (non cancerous). I am so extremely grateful that he is doing much better and almost completely back to normal.Listen to your children. You are their voice. If I didn’t listen to my gut my son might’ve developed life long disabilities that couldn’t have been fixed.Thank you for reading. via /r/Parenting https://ift.tt/2uyMrgF