Pox Presence

Well, the nurse predicted the 11th, and it started on the 10th. He wasn't too bad at first--in fact I almost posted yesterday, 3 days into the breakout, that he wasn't getting them that bad, but then was afraid to say that...with good reason. Last night they exploded.

This is not for the faint of heart--his scalp, under his hair, and his neck are the worst, the density is intense. His face is pretty covered, including around his eyes and ears. Dennis has trouble looking at his neck (which you can't see in this photo and I won't gross you out by posting a photo in which you can see his neck). They have also spread to his hands, diaper area, chest, underarms, and back. Dennis thinks he's gotten even more spots since we took this picture just a couple hours ago.

Eddie is definitely taking this illness better than his parents. He's got a great demeanor, but then this is Eddie we're talking about. And as you can see in the picture, still manages to smile for us. Between mom's guilt at having given it to him and his dad's having to care for two back to back chicken pox patients...we know he'll be okay, but it's pretty scary to see your child not feel well.

We're seeing a couple of his pox burst and start to scab over, which we hope means we are appraoching the halfway point, but new blisters can and likely will still appear. Red spots start to form and they develop into blisters (altho I've found that not every red spot develops into a blister, esp. later on in the illness). The blisters hang out for a couple days and then they pop, dry out and scab over. You are contagious with the pox from a couple days before you break out until all the blisters have scabbed over. I did find that some of the blisters just kind of vanished.

Tonight, Eddie is running about a 102 degree fever. We're hoping tylenol does its thing. I'll try and update again this weekend--our hard drive is bad in our computer, so the posts will probably not be as frequent until it gets replaced next week--the computer is less than a year old. Argh!

Looking forward to healty times again.