igs

So, I was talking to my boss about this little toddler I'd had in my office who came in with a complaint of "unusual episodes, rule out seizures" (which is, y'know, my bread and butter.) Her mother had photos on her cell phone, which she'd shown me, of the baby doing her thing. I was describing it, how she arches herself over the furniture, legs stiff, face reddening, and my boss immediately said, "She's masturbating."

I started to laugh and he was like, "No, I'm serious. They call it infantile gratification syndrome."

"Well, I'm glad they've got a name for it."

"Yeah, politically correct, too. A lot of parents are really, really happy when you tell them that's what it is, because it's not anything bad or serious. And then others..." I was shaking my head over that, and he said that on a internet group for pediatric neurologists that he belongs to, someone actually was talking about a case recently where a family came all the way to the US from Saudi Arabia to have their kid's episodes evaluated, and you can just imagine. Very conservative, old skool Muslim family--there was no way they wanted to hear or to believe that their sweet little two year old daughter was in fact just getting herself off. It led to some interesting discussion in the group about how best to try to present this to families in which social/cultural/religious factors were going to make their even considering the diagnosis difficult.

But anyway, I was thinking in retrospect about what *my* patient's mom had told me when I asked her how often the episodes were occurring and how long they usually lasted: once or twice a day for about 5 minutes.

Yup. Sounds about right to me!

xoxo