Ganglion pneumonia: Mother shares the family’s health scare

Victoria Marton says she initially thought her 11-year-old son just had a normal cough.

Aston fell ill with a cough for about half a week, around mid-October, but it seemed to be getting worse, said the 40-year-old mother from Richmond, Ont.

“It was kind of like a barking cough, like it didn’t sound good,” Marton said as she recounted her family’s health scare in a video interview with CTVNews.ca on Wednesday.

“And on Sunday night he was coughing so much it was waking him up.”

She decided that the next day, Aston would see his pediatrician and she could make an appointment. After getting results back from a chest X-ray, the child was diagnosed with ganglion pneumonia, the informal name for Mycoplasma pneumonia, Marton said.

The Canadian mother shared with CTVNews.ca her family’s health scare as medical experts say cases of the disease and other respiratory illnesses have skyrocketed, filling emergency rooms across the country.

Aston got “significantly better” a few days after he took the antibiotics the doctor had prescribed for him, she said.

Still, he ended up missing nearly two weeks of school while he recovered, Marton said.

Marton’s seven-year-old son, Cooper, also contracted gangrene earlier this month and was home for a week. He had a fever of nearly 40C when he got home from school, which lasted about five days along with a cough, Marton said.

Cooper was also prescribed a five-day dose of antibiotics, Marton said.

The mother says that she was surprised by the diagnosis, as winter has not yet begun.

While doctors say walking pneumonia is typically mild, Marton considers her family lucky that the antibiotics worked quickly and they were able to see the doctor.

“You think it’s just a cough, you think it’s just a fever, it’s just the sniffles. It’s just a flu or something,” she said, noting that both of her sons had unusual “barking” coughing fit. “You don’t think it could be pneumonia. And if it’s not treated, it can be really serious.”

increase in respiratory diseases

Emergency departments nationwide are seeing an increase in patients with viral or respiratory illnesses, including walking pneumonia, says Tammy DeGiovanni, senior vice-president of clinical services and chief nurse at Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO) in Ottawa.

CHEO’s emergency department usually sees about 150 patients a day, but over the past week the number of cases has nearly doubled to between 200 and 250 a day, she said.

The increasing number of children with viral or respiratory illnesses is not unusual this time of year, DeGiovanni said. She was not immediately able to give an estimate of how many cases of walking pneumonia.

“The last two years we’ve seen it’s really been even earlier than normal, but usually we see things pick up this time of year,” she said in a video interview with CTVNews.ca Thursday. “It stretches into December and into January, when we’ll probably peak, but it’s a combination of diseases that are in circulation.”

Doctors say walking pneumonia, or Mycoplasma pneumonia, is common in school-aged children. Children’s hospitals across the country are seeing an unusual increase in the number of severe and more complicated cases of the disease affecting much younger patients this year, according to medical experts.

DeGiovanni says Mycoplasma pneumonia occurs in three- to five-year cycles.

“So it wouldn’t be uncommon for us to have a year where we see more, but we have many, many respiratory diseases and it’s not something we routinely screened for,” she said.

RSV and flu cases are likely to increase within the next few weeks, she said.

How to prevent illness

Health experts give the same advice on how people can avoid getting pneumonia as they would for other respiratory diseases. They recommend washing hands, staying home when sick, and making sure vaccinations are up-to-date, including against COVID, flu and the new RSV for anyone born this year.

DeGiovanni advises parents to research their options for primary care providers, clinics and health resources to avoid waiting in the emergency room.