Hand Foot and Mouth "Disease"

When an illness has "disease" in its title and it sounds suspiciously like the Foot and Mouth disease that kills cows, a Mum is going to worry when her child gets that diagnosis. Luckily a girlfriend's bub had just been struck down with the Medieval sounding affliction that is "Hand Foot and Mouth Disease" so I wasn't quite as freaked out as I could have been.

In fact, it turns out that Hand Foot and Mouth is quite common amongst little people, what with their propensity for grabbing things with their hands and shoving them in their mouths and, well, they have feet so those get involved too.

According to my vast google research, Hand Foot and Mouth is a virus that causes the usual flu symptoms along with blisters that appear in and around the mouth as well as the hands and feet. Most children who contract it have a few spots, while some, like mine, look like they have contracted the bubonic plague.

We're still not sure what we were dealing with when it came to poor Miss Heike's illness, but sadly she was covered head to toe in large, sore blisters. Her ears, her nappy area, her fingers and toes - nowhere escaped unharmed. The blisters were so extensive that in places they were basically on top of one another, and as they dried up whole pieces of skin the size of twenty cent pieces were falling off. BLERGGGH!!

It is possible that she had the chicken pox as well as HFM which caused her case to be so serious, while it is also possible that she just had a really, really bad dose of Hand Foot and Mouth, which is what her GP seemed to think (after we had gotten a chicken pox diagnosis at casualty days earlier). Either way, I feel so sorry for the poor poppet!

No one tells you how hard it is when your child gets sick. You feel like crying on their behalf. You also feel like crying because they are crying so much and you don't know how to fix it. Also if they have an infectious disease you can't leave the house, so then you do cry because you are going INSANE!

At the peak of all our chicken pox/HFM drama, Heike got her first three teeth - three top teeth that look very cute. So it seems she has inherited her mother's flair for drama, whereby life ticks along normally for weeks and then BAM! seventeen significant and disasterous things happen in one day. Just to keep life in perspective.

Z xx