She bites her lips in the winter time. Consequently her lips get chapped and cracked and we spend the winter trying to heal her adorably ragged mouth. This is why I didn't get alarmed by the dry skin that formed around her mouth a week ago. Or at least that is what I'm telling myself. I suspect that if I wasn't so busy working on this business project of mine I might have noticed that the skin was worse than usual, that the cold season had not really begun, that something was actually wrong.
But I didn't. In fact I almost didn't take her to the doctor. Her sister was sick and I made an appointment for her to see the doctor at the end of an afternoon. During the day a corner of my Juju's red skin turned yellow and cracked open. It was as if she'd eaten curry and let it dry on her mouth. It was horrific. So even though my eldest was feeling better by the time of the appointment, we went to the doctor.
It sounds so exotic, like something you'd catch on vacation in Fiji or the Maldives. In reality it's one of the more common skin disorders in children and sometimes you don't need medicine to treat it. Good hygiene and warm soakings tend to do the trick.
She needed medicine.
I'm not sure why I continue to be exposed to the kinds of diseases that require hazmat levels of house cleaning. I'm so bad at it and it makes me resentful to do repeated armfuls of laundry. When my big girl was a baby she got scabies in Mexico. Two years ago they both got lice from school. Then lice again. Then lice again. Every time we had to wash everything that might harbor the critters in scalding hot water. What couldn't be washed was exiled to the garage, to spend the next 90 days in plastic garbage bags. (This turns out to be an excellent way to purge the house of stuffed animals, by the way.)
Impetigo is extremely contagious. Being that she is seven, she touches everything and everyone with love and affection. Or a good smack. But mostly she's a cuddler who loves to kiss and hug and hug and kiss and cuddle and get those germy Impetigos all over everyone. Okay, she isn't doing that now, but before she was diagnosed it was constant cuddling as usual. No, I don't actually know if she has infected any of her friends, we're on holiday this week, but you're right: seven year old girls are extremely touchy with each other. I expect pitchforks and firebrands come Monday.
Whenever we would suspect lice my skin would begin to crawl uncontrollably. I never caught it myself, but I experienced the symptoms each time. I have combed my hair and combed my hair and combed my hair until I combed myself half bald. I have seriously considered shaving it all off just so I wouldn't have to wonder anymore.
It's the same with this Impetigo. My mouth is itchy. My nose is itchy. The skin around both is pink (but not because I'm rubbing it non stop). Do I have it? Probably not, but who knows? All I know is that I itch. Oh, and I know that before we knew she had Impetigo we thought she had chapped lips, so we, uh, put chapstick on her. Yes the same ones we use and have been using this whole week. I think I've disposed of them all, but oh my god, little girls squirrel away lip balm like nuts for nuclear winter. I'm convinced there are inch-long Impetigo lip bombs hiding under beds and in drawers all over my house. I have no idea how long bacteria can survive in a lip balm, which, if you think about it is a completely unregulated product and probably made of toxic materials that will combine with the Impetigo to create a whole new strain of resistant bacteria. I have a way of letting my worst case scenarios run away with my imagination.
My girl feels like a leper, of course. She, who is so addicted to physical shows of affection complains loudly and with repetition about how no one wants to kiss her. This is not entirely true, but we are much more careful about kissing her. It's all about her forehead now, or the top of her head. Cheeks are out of the question and she is not allowed to kiss us back. Her laundry needs to be separated and I'm supposed to be washing her sheets every day. I'm not exactly doing that.
We've spent this entire school break inside the house. We leave for little errands but come home quickly because 1) she's infectious and 2) she hates the way people look at her. Thankfully she goes through waves of self consciousness, swinging between hiding in corners and being sad, to acting perfectly normal, to threatening to infect her sister on purpose. Ah, my little Juju, you are such a complicated little thing.
The incubation period for Impetigo is, according to medical sites, 1-3 days. My question is, when does the 1-3 days begin and end? One to three days sounds positively manageable, until you realize she's had this for 10 days and has very recently become kind-of, mostly non infectious. What I mean by this is that if you kissed her on the lips you might get it, but if you don't touch her you're probably fine. (Nice definition don't you think? It's the one that enables me to leave the house without feeling that I'm endangering the world with our puss contagion. And no, we don't actually call her that.)
It's that kind of thinking that will remind my karma that I haven't had a good lesson lately. My karma is terribly efficient at taking care of this kind of stuff however, and if I am truly being bad, my karma will ensure my lips bear the brunt of it soon enough.
Oh, the poor thing. I hope she feels better soon.
As for you catching it, I doubt it - the site says that it "mainly affects infants and children", and you haven't been either in a long time, have you?
I hope her sister doesn't get it.
I believe you jinxed it by blogging about clean laundry (bedsheets)..now you are forced to do more of it.
Posted by: Lakshmi | 10/28/2010 at 12:46 AM
I hadn't really heard of this at all, but man, you lead an itchy life! (Just commented on original lice story, which I hadn't read before.) In this case, it sounds more like someone else isn't on the job with their own kids, spreading the stuff around. So sorry about that.
Posted by: liliales | 10/28/2010 at 12:48 PM
I had to be hospitalized with that stuff in the 2nd grade. No fun :-(
Posted by: Kitty Ireland | 10/28/2010 at 10:41 PM