One Friday morning in September 2025, my 8-year-old daughter, Rose, woke up with a sore throat. Since her toddler years, we have asked her to hold her hands apart to show us how bad something hurts. That day, she separated her palms four inches: medium. I held the thermometer to her forehead (99 degrees) and then got her cozy on the sofa with The Nightmare Before Christmas and a box of tissues. Over the weekend, she cheerfully stayed there, rotating through old Disney Channel shows, Labyrinth, and her favorite spooky cartoon, The Haunted House. By Sunday evening, she was asking if we could visit the splash pad in our Toronto neighborhood, and when she returned to school on Tuesday, my husband, David, her 1-year-old brother, Calvin, and I all seemed to have come down with the same illness. It felt like a minor cold.
But over the next few days, Rose started to change. First, it was her limbs. As she was falling asleep one night, her arms and legs suddenly and uncontrollably shot out in front of her, like she was imitating a zombie. If she tried to relax, her abdominal muscles would contract, forcing her to sit upright. This happened dozens of times over the course of an hour, so David took her to the emergency room while I stayed home with our sleeping baby. After Rose’s preliminary blood work came back normal, the doctors attributed the movements to an unusual viral symptom. But not long after, there was a new problem: Rose told us she felt like she was “vibrating inside.” We brought her to a pediatric emergency clinic but were given the same explanation. I called her pediatrician, who said that while he had never heard of a virus having this effect, he was unconcerned and asked me to call again if her symptoms changed. He said she was well enough to go back to school.
