Impetigo

Whoever is in charge of crowning the Mother of the Year...you can skip me this year. Apparently, my son had strep and impetigo for a week before I even thought to take him to the doctor. A week!

Here's the deal. He gets these little bumps on his face sometimes when he gets a cold. He rubs his nose and the snot gets on his face, and his face breaks out a little. They last a few days and then go away, until the next cold.

Two weeks ago, I got hit HARD with a bout of strep. I felt like all I could do was lay in bed and moan. But I dragged myself to the doctor and was diagnosed with strep, and two days later I was pretty much back to normal. I kept an eye on Carter's throat to make sure he didn't catch it from me and all seemed to be fine.

Except a week later I noticed those little bumps on his face again. I figured they'd go away in a few days like they normally do, but by the end of the week they had multiplied and concentrated around his nose and mouth, not where they typically would show up. So finally on Saturday morning I asked Chris if he thought we should take him to clinic hours, just to see what was up. We headed out a short while later.

I, for one, was woefully unprepared for what awaited us at the doctor's office. We were behind maybe 15 kids, all of them miserable. We sat there for a few minutes until I suggested maybe we should try the Minute Clinic across the street. Out we headed and waited about 45 minutes to be seen. The NP looked at Carter's bumps and said she thought maybe it was MRSA (gasp!) and that she wasn't equipped to take swabs of that sort of thing, especially given his age, so we should go back to the ped's office. Great.

My heart racing, thinking my son has had MRSA on his face for a week, we went back to the doctor's office and waited for 1.5 hours to be seen. This doctor was great, said it looked like impetigo and that she'd test him for strep since his tonsils and glands were just a little bit swollen. Okay fine. I'd actually looked up impetigo the night before and his face looked NOTHING like what I saw online. These were just little pimples, so I wasn't buying her story.

Lo and behold, he had the strep test, it was positive, and the strep is what caused the impetigo. So not only had I given him strep, but he'd been at school all week and likely had spread it to all of his friends. Fabulous.

Fast forward two days. Antibiotics are working beautifully, the dots are clearing up, Carter's feeling fine (as he was all along) but a letter is sent out to the parents in his class that three of the teachers and many students were out with strep and/or impetigo. And we caused that. Oh, the guilt.