Hand Foot Mouth -- aka Coxsackievirus A6

On Thursday Owen ran a fever. He had it for a little less than 24 hours. He didn't seem that uncomfortable and as he is cutting 6 (yes 6) teeth I figured maybe it was from teething. I'm not the quick rush your kid to the doctor type so the fever didn't really bother me. Plus, Owen is just a happy easy baby and a fever is not enough to stop him from being sweet and easy. On Friday he was a little bit out of sorts but the fever was gone. He seemed fine (he played and went frogging and was happy). And then today we had all our regular assortment of games (4 soccer, 3 softball). Most of these are occuring in some sort of crazy concurrent schedule between 1 and 5 right during Owen's naptime. So he didn't get a nap, but he was happy and smiley for all of them. We got home and I looked forward to putting him to bed early and then Trent and I were going to grab a bite to eat (at shake shack :) yummy!)

I laid him down at 7 and he fell right asleep, but at 7:05 he was screaming. I rocked him and laid him down at 7:10 and he was asleep but by 7:15 he was screaming again. This time he was screaming "owie, owie!". I couldn't see anything that was hurting him, so I rocked him asleep and laid him in his crib again at 7:25. Then I ran to pick up Madelyn from a birthday party. When I pulled into the garage, Trent was holding Owen and said that he woke up right away and yelling Owie.

Knowing Owen was tired, I again rocked him to sleep, this time for 20 minutes to make sure he was really asleep. I laid him in the crib and kept rubbing his back. It was then that I noticed him in his sleep trying to scratch at his feet. His room was dark though and I couldn't see anything. But sure enough he didn't stay asleep. This time I took him into our room, turned on all the lights and looked closely at his feet.

I was so surprised to see the bottom of the soles of his feet covered in little blisters all over. Not only little blisters but little red spots in all the spots without blisters. Quickly I looked at his mouth, he had a few around his lips and finally inside his mouth he had lots of little sores. I knew we had a case of hand foot mouth. The girls had had it 5 or 6 years ago, but I was surprised by how bad this version seemed. My sister (a nurse) sent me a link to this USA today article on a new particularly tough version of HFM.

So we are under a bit of a quarantine here.