On Monday afternoons from 4-5 our two younger boys go to swimming at the swimming school across the road from our house. This week, at the same time, we had a meeting with the teachers of one of our boys about his behaviour. David's phone rang in the middle of the meeting, but he didn't answer it.
It turns out it was from the swimming pool. When we arrived home we found one boy had had to sit out the whole lesson, the other one part of the lesson. They weren't very happy. They didn't understand and neither did we. David returned the call and it seems they were concerned about our boys' skin, that they were infectious.
A few weeks back I mentioned that our middle son had been diagnosed with dermatitis. A couple of weeks later our youngest was also diagnosed with dermatitis (thankfully we have easy access to a dermatologist). So they were both diligently putting their cream on and taking the medication. Just recently I noticed small raised fluid-filled blisters, but I assumed that was just a part of the dermatitis. Turns out it wasn't.
Yesterday I spent all day on the other side of the metropolis at our monthly OMF prayer meeting/fellowship time. Not knowing how late I'd be home, David volunteered to take them both to the dermatologist again.
He found out both boys also have an infection of molluscum contagiosum virus, or Water Warts. Unrelated to usual warts, but nonetheless contagious, which is why the swimming instructors were concerned.
This is hard to get rid of, the natural course of doing nothing would take about two years. Two years of no swimming! Alternatives include pinching off the warts with tweezers (which sounds horrible) or freezing them off. With some persuasion, they chose the freezing route.
And now they have to go back in a few weeks to check their progress. The swimming pool won't let them back without authority from the doctor, understandably. But it was hard to figure out on Monday afternoon, I just felt indignant. Another piece of cultural/language misunderstanding.
This could mean the end of swimming lessons, though. Both of them were waning in enthusiasm and this might be the nail in the coffin, so to speak.
I tried to clear this week of extraneous things so that I'd be free to volunteer at Thrift Shop, but a few things such as this have popped up. That's meant I don't have the energy to volunteer quite as much as I might have. But as Georgia commented on my Facebook page about my last post, I need to drop some plates and focus on taking care of me and my family first. So, I'm trying!
You get to be only the second (and third) case of that that I have ever heard of! My little bro had it as a child and it stymied the docs as to where it had come from, until it was revealed we'd only been in town for about three months. Our previous town was a much more likely candidate for it. And so I've always thought of it as a "school out in the west" type of disease and never would have thought of it occurring in densely populated areas (although now I think about it, once it was there I can understand how it would spread). So I've learnt something new today.
ReplyDeleteI hope they both do well with the treatment. It sounds much nastier now than then.
Rosie had this a year or so ago. It is a bit of a weird bug, and we're not sure how she caught it either (fortunately no one else in our family ended up with it).
ReplyDeleteBeing the sadists we are, we went with the pinching off approach to management (we didn't worry about the tweezers, Chris just pinched them all off). It did take a few months to get rid of, but in saying that, it did take us a while to get her to the doctor to look at them in the first place :) She wasn't doing swimming or anything else at the time so we didn't have to pull her out of anything she was doing, and it was okay for her to go to childcare. They do clear up completely though, looking at her now you would never know she had them.
Hope all goes well getting rid of them.