Chicken Pox????

You'll never guess what we have at our house (well, I guess if you read the title you can guess).

Yep. Chicken Pox. Can you believe it???

To be technical it is called Breakthrough Varicella (or Chicken Pox after being vaccinated). It is a little different from the full blown Chicken Pox. It is thankfully much milder in ever sense:  less pox, less itchy, less contagious, and the pox don't blister and scab up. But don't get me wrong, it has still been a royal pain.

It began on Thursday when Renae told me she wasn't feeling very well. Renae often says that in the morning and I've found if I just ignore it then she usually gets out of bed, gets going, and feels fine. So that is what I did. As we left for school she told me that she had 4 bumps on her abdomen. I looked at them. They looked like mosquito bites, but they were all in one cluster. Weird. It is not mosquito season. Maybe a spider?? We headed off to school, but I told her to come get me if it got worse or changed (I work at her school so I'm just down another hallway). About an hour and a half later she came into my room. "Mom, I have 12 of them now!" I took her outside in the hall and looked at her thoroughly and she had another 8 on her back. I also noticed that she was flushed and a bit hot. We headed home.

I called the Dr. (well tried, I left a message for the nurse). While waiting for them to return my call I did my own research on the internet. I'm sure my search was not exhaustive, but from everything I could find, it sounded exactly like Breakthrough Varicella (Chicken Pox after Vaccination). When the nurse finally called back, they seemed to think the same thing. They didn't even give me any "maybe it is _____________" or "it could be _____________." Since there is no medicine that can help a virus they told me to just give her lots of fluids and treat the discomfort and itch with over the counter meds. I still wasn't convinced so I did more and more research over the next couple days. I never found anything else that even came close to describing her symptoms except for the chicken pox. Sigh.

So here we are. Renae is feeling mostly better now, the itchiness is getting better each day...yet we are still banned from society. The latest research I found says that with BTV (I made up that acronym cuz I'm tired of writing it out) you don't wait for the blisters to scab before returning to school like with regular chicken pox (they aren't really blisters). Instead you wait either 7 days from the appearance of the first pox or 24 hours after you stop getting new pox. We haven't reached either of those milestones so she is still at home BORED OUT OF HER MIND.

I am so grateful that she was vaccinated so we only have this minor version with less than 50 pox instead of the 200-300 pox in a normal case. I look at the pictures of full blown chicken pox online and I am stunned that we all went through that disease as children. It is horrid. Thank goodness our kids don't have to!!

What are the odds? Turns out that about 4% of vaccinated kids get this version of chicken pox. I always knew Renae was exceptional. Let's hope my other kids are not this special.

(Note: any errors in medical knowledge or scientific research are purely my own. This is what I could gather with the resources at my fingertips. Feel free to correct or challenge anything you read here. I am NOT an expert).