Curse of the Itchy Bitches

It’s been a little quiet in blog land recently, and for that I can only apologise. Eden and I have been on house arrest for about a week now. About Wednesday last week she slept almost all day and we wondered if anything was wrong, but as she was eating and drinking normally and was fully awake when she was awake, we assumed it was maybe a growth spurt.

Thursday she seemed to be fine, so we were out and about as usual. It wasn’t until Friday that we noticed a spot on her chest. Then one on her head… then another… then one in her ear. We wondered whether it could be chicken pox, so I kept her inside anyhow.

By Saturday she was covered head to foot in nasty blistery spots and was pretty miserable with it. I went all “Doc Mcstuffins” and we added “Itchy Bitches” to the big book of boo boos Being so young, we could only use calamine gel and Calpol to help her with her symptoms. This kid’s spirit constantly amazes me because, although you could tell that she wasn’t feeling very well, she was still her usual smiley self. Albeit she had a fair amount of calamine splodges on her!

 

Over the following days it just got worse and worse. We kept floating the idea of taking her to a doctor, but as her temperature was being kept under control with Calpol and she was mostly eating and drinking normally, we decided there wouldn’t be much that they would be able to do for her anyway so better to keep her comfortable at home. I did phone 111, which is the non emergency medical number here, and they reassured me that we were doing everything we could. There were a couple of screamy days where Eden clearly felt like crap, but we got through with the help of Calpol and oat baths to help dry up the spots.

Thankfully she’s definitely on the mend now. She’s no longer contagious as all of her spots have scabbed, so it means we might be able to go for a walk in the park or something tomorrow. People keep saying “good to get it over with young”, which is right I guess, but at the same time it’s crap that she had to get it anyway. A lot of my American friends are surprised that we don’t vaccinate against it routinely here and I think if Amy and I have any more children we will certainly pay privately for the vaccine. Wouldn’t have made any difference for Eden as she is too young for it at the moment, but still.

Anyway, so that’s our first “big” illness out of the way without incident. I’m proud of how Amy and I pulled together as a team to get Eden through as it clearly sucked for her. Luckily she’s not coordinated enough to scratch the spots, so we didn’t have that to contend with, but it was still not a fun week or so.

Hopefully she will continue to improve and we’ll be off to Disneyland in just over a week with this whole itchy mess behind us!