Monkey Pox

I stand by a statement I made ages ago that kids are nothing but walking germ buckets.  You send them off to school and it starts.  First it’s a cold, then the flu, then strep throat, not even going to get into lice.  You send them off healthy and they come back sneezing and dripping snot.  No matter what you do you can’t avoid it.  It passes from one member of the family to another to another.  It’s a daisy chain of sickness with each person getting it worse than the last.  By the time the last person up comes down with it, they want to kill the original carrier of the disease.  Only they can’t do that because that person is all better now, and due to them being on their death bed, they are unable to run fast enough to catch them.

Now the school doesn’t give you any warning when illness is sweeping through it.  They’ll send a note home for lice but not if 15 out of 20 kids are out of your kids class with the flu.  You usually don’t find out until you either get a call from the school to come pick your suddenly ill child up or you call them in sick and are told about it.  And this is what happened to me this week.

A call from the school nurse on Tuesday that my youngest was running a low grade fever and complaining his throat hurt.  Really?  He never said anything to me.  Well, there is strep going around school.  Fuck, I think to myself.  Just FUCK.  I go and get him and he’s got a low fever, give him some advil for it, a glass of water and tell him to nap.  Peered in his mouth with a flashlight for those tell tail white dots on the back of the throat, kept him home from school on Wednesday and his fever broke early morning.  Figured he had a slight version of a cold his brother brought home the week before.  I sent him back to school Thursday.  He was there for less than an hour when my phone rang.  The nurse proceeded to ream my ass.  “He can’t be in school, he isn’t scabbed over yet!”  My mind scrambled wondering why he would need to be scabbed over and all I could say was, “Huh?”  “He has chicken pox!”  The fuck you say, my head said.  Luckily my mouth filtered it to something else, “He has what?”  “Chicken pox!  It’s been going around.  There were ten kids out yesterday with it.  He can’t be here until he’s scabbed over!”  “Ok…” I’m thinking she needs to calm down, it’s not like I sent him to school with Ebola and didn’t he get it there to begin with? “I’m on my way.”

Now, I know you are wondering how I missed chicken pox.  I’ll tell you how.  It’s easy really.  Reason one he’s had the vaccine less than five years ago.  Reason two, he is eleven years old, I don’t see him naked.  All his bumps are on his chest and his stomach.  He never complained about itching so I had no reason to strip him.  I had no reason to make him strip because the school never sent home a letter saying there was a chicken pox outbreak at school.  Unlike when they send home notes about lice and I go over his head with a magnifying glass.  Had they sent home a note, I would have made him strip off his shirt.  I would have asked him if he itched.  I would have dragged him under bright lights to check.  So, damn them for not telling me.

Here’s hoping I make it through the chicken pox without scratching myself silly due to the heebie jeebies of knowing he has it.  Also, here’s hoping I don’t get shingles, which I can apparently get since I have already had the chicken pox and it still resides in my body.  Fuck, I itch all over!

~ by blogofmisfitdreams on March 27, 2009.