![]() ![]() Kay’s mother had tampered with her daughter’s urine samples to make her appear to be ill when she wasn’t. Kay and Charles, it turned out, did have something in common. He would arrive at the emergency room with weirdly high sodium levels in his blood, but his renal and endocrine systems showed no evidence of disease as Meadow notes in his article, “between attacks, Charles was healthy and developing normally.” Charles, a fourteen-month-old, had suffered for more than a year with bouts of drowsiness and vomiting, which came on suddenly and without evident cause, and for which he, too, had been hospitalized on several occasions. In the course of consultations with sixteen doctors, she had been admitted to the hospital twelve times, catheterized, X-rayed, and treated unsuccessfully with eight different antibiotics. Kay, a six-year-old, had what appeared to be a recurrent urinary-tract infection. Initially, there seemed to be no similarity between the cases. In 1977, Roy Meadow, a British pediatrician, published an account of two children whose symptoms had, for a time, baffled him. ![]()
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