Shots Across The Bow

Light blogging, but with a heck of a good excuse.

It started very innocuously. Luke complained after football practice that his skin was hurting underneath his hip pads. I looked, and there was a little redness, but nothing major. I figured he had sensitive skin, and that in a day or two, it would go away.

Wrong.

The next day, the red had turned into a small rash, and hurt worse. His coach and I figured he might be allergic to the pads. He switched from a half T-shirt to a full shirt, and kept that between the pads and his skin. The coach said he had seen rashes like that before, and to put baby powder on all of the pads.

The next day, the rash began to blister, and Luke told me that his skin in other places was beginning to hurt. I started to worry at this point, and checked him out again. The rash was still localized to under his hip pad, but a new one started under his butt pad, and there were red patches starting on his leg. I knew it wasn't an allergic reaction, but it looked so much like poison ivy that I thought maybe he had gotten some underneath his pads, but it didn't itch, it hurt.

His mother looked at it, and mentioned that it looked like shingles to her, but it couldn't have been shingles because that's an adult relapse of chicken pox, and Luke had never had chicken pox. We looked it up on the web, and his symptoms matched perfectly. he was standing with us while we were talking about it and mentioned that a boy on his football team was recovering from chicken pox when practice had started 2 weeks earlier.

Case closed. We had the culprit.

I called the doctor's ofice first thing Monday morning, and couldn't get an appointment until this afternoon. They told me to give him ibuprofen for the pain and make him comfortable for the night.

Easier said than done.

It's a very helpless feeling when your child is hurting and there's nothing you can do about it. You want to take the pain for them; you ask God to spare them and give it to you, but it never works that way, and the best you can do is be there for them. The poor guy was in a fair bit of pain, but he handled it better than I would have. He cried a little, but didn't whine or gripe, facing the pain with a smile for the most part, and that's more than you can expect from most men. I did what i could; we did find that soaking a paper towel in cold water and putting it gently on the rash helped, and so did cool baths.

We made it through the night and left the house to go to the doctor's office. As soon as the sun hit the rash, it started burning him again, so he wasn't very happy until we got into the office and out of the heat. The nurse got his height and weight and took us back to the exam room and asked what the problem was. Luke pulled up his shirt and showed her.

She immediately gasped, and started saying "You poor thing," and other things nurses say to try and make kids feel better. She seemed a little rattled, but I what really surprised me was the doctor's reaction when he walked in.

He looked at Luke's back, stuttered for a moment and said, "That must hurt like a mother-f....a lot!"

He regained his composure, took a blood and urine sample from Luke and gave us a prescription for an antiviral. All the while, he kept saying how bad it must hurt. Luke kinda laughed a little and said it did hurt, but he was dealing with it.

I got misty.

Anyway, we headed for the house, and I went and got Luke's medicine, so we should be on the road to recovery now. He's sitting here beside me and wants to show y'all what we've been talking about.

WARNING: The image at this link
is nasty. It hurts me just to look at it. You've been warned!

Posted by Rich at August 19, 2003 10:42 PM | TrackBack