I imagine running a day care is a tricky business; you have a staff of a dozen or so looking after 50-60 children. Children are living petri dishes and catch all kinds of stuff when they’re young, and therefore day care’ are always on the lookout for symptoms that may infect the entire facility.
Over the weekend, Gabe had quite the fever and was generally an unhappy little guy. We peaked into his mouth, saw a tooth poking through to join the half-a-dozen other teeth he had already sprouted, so passed the fever off as teething. We gave him Tylenol, a bit miffed that the fever didn’t budge for 3 days (Friday he started getting warm pretty suddenly).
Sunday night’s bath found he had a red rash, somewhat like what we see with his eczema. We thought nothing of it. He still had a fever, so we just put the eczema cream on the rash and put him to bed like normal.
Monday morning, I was in Edmonton on business, so Jeff got him ready in the morning and sent him off to daycare. Jeff calls me at around 5 that night saying the day care thought he had Baby Measles.
Measles!
I panicked, mostly because I was in Edmonton and couldn’t see for myself if it was just the day care being overly concerned or if something was really wrong. I couldn’t get home until 10 at night and had to wait until morning when Gabe got up. And the entire time, I’m thinking measles in a child that young can NOT be a good thing!
The next morning, he seemed fine, was his normal chipper self. He had a bit of a bumpy rash on his face, but most noticeable were red patches on his eyelids and under his eyes. All in all, it just looked like an allergic reaction I have when I get into wheat or flour and set off my Celiac Disease, so we passed it off as a recent change in our laundry soap. Just in case, and to help the daycare feel better, we made an appointment with the doc.
Turns out he had Roseola, which is commonly called “baby measles”, but the term ‘measles’ is extremely incorrect. Roseola is cause by a virus that infects almost every young kids before the age of 3, sorta like Chicken Pox. A baby will be infected for about a week without symptoms and sometimes just go through a Roseola infection unnoticed. ‘Symptoms’ only appear once the virusis being fought off by the immune system; High fever that can last 3-5 days, followed immediately by a rash or red-n-white rashlike pattern on the face, tummy and back.
We were joking in the car on the way back from the doctors, we joked that the daycare’s query of their signs and symptoms book (from the 70’s) was severely inaccurate:
SELECT TOP 1 Disease FROM Symptoms
WHERE Symptom = rash
ORDER BY Severity DESC;
But, who can blame them, when they have 50 other kids they need to keep healthy.
