It's Chicken Pox!?!?

But He Was Vaccinated!

We appreciated the winter reprieve but once the weather started to warm up J's mysterious symptoms returned with a vengeance. He started developing large water-type blisters on random areas of his body. Some seemed to bother him or be more painful than others.

J also suffers from allergy triggered asthma. We were at a regularly scheduled check-up with the asthma doc when she asked about the blisters he had on his arm... I attempted to give her a brief explanation of his mysterious symptoms. She was completely convinced they were blisters and sores from Chicken Pox. Chicken Pox? I explained J had been vaccinated for Chicken Pox so I didn't really understand how he could currently be suffering from the disease. She explained that the vaccines are not always 100% and sometimes kids still end up with an outbreak... but a weaker version. She explained that this was why he only had the blisters in a few random areas and not all over like a typical case of Chicken Pox. She cautioned me to keep him away from other children for a good 2-3 weeks as he was highly contagious as long as he had blisters. Two to three weeks! That meant no play dates, no Sunday School and no day care! I was only working a few days a week at the time... but as you can imagine it was quite the inconvenience to quarantine my active toddler for three whole weeks!

A couple of weeks into J's "quarantine" it was obvious we were not dealing with Chicken Pox. The areas around the blisters were starting to swell up into the big, huge, hot, red, burning welts we recognized from the previous summer. The big watery blisters were new but the hot burning welts were the same. We paid another visit to the Pediatrician for steroids and antibiotics which seemed to be the only thing that helped. The Pediatrician referred to the lesions as "Cellulitis" which is a skin infection caused by bacteria. How or why this was happening was still a mystery.