Chickenpox, Measles, and Mistletoe

Last Friday when Maddie woke up with that fever ended up being the least of my worries that weekend. On Saturday night when I was getting her ready for bed, I was changing her diaper and noticed her tummy covered in little red spots. They looked like little bug bites. It didn't look like heat rash but not like an allergic reaction to anything either. So I got online and was looking up her symptoms and everything pointed to the chickenpox. The 101' fever, the flu-like symptoms, a rash on the belly two days after the fever, etc. So I called Nicole first, and we were both thinking the same thing. Who knows how in the world Maddie got it but I just infected 1/3 of Pasco with it because we were out delivering all those bags of popcorn to everyone and who knows how contagious this is. Nicole quickly incinerated her bag. So I'm online reading all these horrible things to expect with the chickenpox and Nicole and I are getting more and more nervous that this is really what it is. I called the oncall doctor and spoke to her about all of Maddie's symptoms and she said the same thing. It's the chickenpox. Her own 2 boys who were already immunized had just gotten over it themselves and it is always going around. She told me to quarantine my entire family for the next week or 2 and even though my older kids were all immunized from the chickenpox didn't mean they wouldn't come down with a light case of it. I thought I was going to have to make 30 phonecalls that night to our friends who just received a bag of popcorn from a highly contagious house. The doctor informed me there's no way it could be passed through paper, only from the infected person directly. Whew!! But the thought of trying to keep my kids quarantined about killed me. But you do what you have to do.

My mistake during this whole ordeal was showing my kids what chickenpox looked like to somewhat prepare them for what Maddie would eventually look like once we were in the worst stage. We were looking at these pictures before the phone call to the doctor. These pictures had to be the worst case scenarios. They were just awful!! Way too graphic for little kids. But we all saw them and were grossed out completely. THEN I had to tell them that there was a possibility that they might get it, too. Ally and Cameron were crying unconsolably. Ally had to sleep in my bed that night because she was terrified about getting it from sleeping in the same room as Maddie. So here's a tip for all of you out there, don't show your kids the graphic pictures before telling them that they might look like what they just saw.

So Sunday morning rolls around and sure enough Maddie is covered from head to toe in chickenpox. It's on her eyelids, in her ears, her scalp, on her arms, legs, back, just everywhere. The only relief is tylenol, oatmeal baths, and calamine lotion. So Jeff was going to go to the store to get everything we need and gets called in. I couldn't go with the sick baby so we had to wait. And wait. Jeff was at work for several hours then we got caught up in getting everything ready for Christmas the next morning. Maddie seemed to be handling everything okay with just tylenol around the clock.

Christmas morning I was expecting to find Maddie unrecognizable under all the blistering chickenpox she was going to suffer from. For some reason, she looked even better than the day before with all the chickenpox being hardly noticable at all. It made me wonder if it was ever the chickenpox to begin with. Realizing she had been given her first dose of the MMR vaccine 2 weeks earlier, I started wondering if it was a reaction from that and instead was walking around with the measles. My mom thought it sounded like the measles, too, and I thought I would just continue to watch her and see what else was going to happen.

Christmas was lots of fun by the way, and Jeff didn't get called in the whole day.

So this morning, Maddie wakes up without a single mark on her. Nothing. Just her perfect velvety soft baby skin. I thought that was the easiest case of chickenpox in medical history or I completely missed the boat on this one. I called the nurse and was waiting for a return phone call for only 4 hours and called Nicole again, telling her what I suspected. "It was only a reaction to the MMR vaccine and she had the measles instead! So hopefully Maddie didn't infect Zoe or any other non-vaccinated baby with the measles while she was coming down with the infection herself!" Obviously Nicole wanted me to call her back as soon as the nurse called me.

Turns out my suspicions were right. It was just a reaction to the MMR vaccine 9 days after she received it. She was in no way contagious and wasn't even considered infected with the measles. It was only her own body building up the immunity to the measles and is just what her little body did. Most likely the next dose won't cause the same reaction. We'll see about that. Seems like if something is possible it will happen to Maddie.

So all you recipients of the caramel corn, you can rest assured your children won't get the chickenpox or the measles. Hope you liked it. I've had several requests to make it every year. I'll have to think twice on that one. The memories are still a little too haunting right now.

Hope you all had a Merry Christmas!!