Chicken Pox

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I posted about my son having chicken pox in the parenting section but I'm gonna post a little b**** about the ER and the whole pox at Thanksgiving thing here.

My son JR is 14. He's NT. All my kids are. JR does have ADHD (third time in the 7th grade and when he does the work he's good, he just acts up with his friends too much) and he was born completely deaf in his left ear, but he doesn't ever notice it and has done just fine. Doesn't even want an implant or anything later on. He's hardcore about taking life as it comes. Anyway...

JR showed me some spots on his stomach Saturday evening. About four or five. Looked like bug bites. There werent any anywhere else. I said don't scratch them. He felt fine and went on to the party he was going to with his friends. It was just up the hill in the back in some apartments so they walked. He's always walking back there and it's through some cleared land and mud where houses are gonna be, so I figured he got bit by something. He had had a sore throat off and on, but no fever or nodes so I didn't think anything more of it than a possible postnasal drip. And bug bites. They got home about midnight and went to his room to play the Wii, I went to bed.

Sunday about 10 when they got up he showed me his stomach. There were more. On his back too. And some on his neck and up by his ears. Still felt fine. But it's chicken pox. I know that rash, my oldest had it. I told my husband take him to the ER while I clean up around here and just get a DX for a school excuse. Well, this town here is VERY small. We have the one hospital in the county about a mile up the road. It's got maybe 20 beds and an ER and an unused OR because there are no surgeons or anything. They don't even deliver babies. They send the bigger cases by ambulance or helicopter to the hospitals in the city. But this is fine for chicken pox. We have one doctors office here too. The doctors come for a couple of years to do a fellowship in rural healthcare then leave. The one constant we have is a nurse practitioner who serves as the pediatritian. She's good and has seen them since we moved here nine years ago. She doesn't work the ER though. They bring Dr's in from other places to moonlight there. Sunday they only had a nurse practitioner there. But still. Chicken pox. This was a girl from some other hospital we didn't know.

She looked at him and said it was a skin irritation from using the bath brush Thursday night!! ! WTF??? That's why it's spreading? That's why he had a sore throat? Huh?? Well, my husband being the kind to take the word of anyone in a white coat as Gospel, said Okey Dokey and took the Hibiclens she gave him and brought him home. He was going to let JR go to the movies with a friend. I said "Uh, no. It's Chicken Pox". So today we go to see his doctor, the nurse practitioner. This morning he's covered in them. Covered. Itched so bad last night he came and woke me up for a Benadryl.

Here is what bothers me. They will spend so much money on trying to prosecute petty things but won't spend money on staffing the hospital. One friend of JR's who is 16 was seen walking down the street smoking a cigarette. By a cop. Get this, the cop went to the boys house and told the mother and had her bring him down and put him on probation. Really. Parents can do that here. No court. I forgot what it's called but they sign something. So thats money wasted on a kid that smoked in public when the medical care is almost nil. Why don't these people care about getting some kind of care??

PaganMom

Just got back from the dr, and it is the chicken pox. The girls will probably break out by the weekend.

PaganMom

That sucks PaganMom, sorry to hear about your son.

They do need to have a bigger budget for hospital care. This has potentially put your son's health at risk and is an inconvenience for you and your family. I think unfortunately there are unqualified people at every job, but you'd think that they would have someone capable enough on staff to diagnose the chicken pox at the very least.

Not sure how old your girls are, hopefully they get through this. Best case scenario, if they catch then it'll just be them getting it early and not having to deal with it or a vaccination later.

Your town really needs to get qualified specialists anyway. I know they send bigger cases by ambulance or helicopter but man, how small could your town really be? I could imagine if they sent cases they couldn't fit in to another town, but not having any nearby option incase of emergy sounds inconvenient.

Oh, it's that small here. The 'town' itself is about three square miles. That's it. The hospital is the counties only hospital. THe thing is, most people in this town were born and raised here and are used to it and see no need to have it any differently. I however, grew up in Birmignham near UAB, Childrens, Cooper Green, St Vincents, Montclair, Brookwood, Medical Center East, South Highlands. Those were just the hospitals in the Bham Metro area.

My mom was Director of Nursing at one hospital and had been a nurse all my life, obviously. She took me to work with her from the time I was about 8 years old and I would help out in her office and sometimes she would get friends of hers to let me help out on the floors. Not with patient care then of course, but at the desk etc. I was actually VERY mature for my age, what with not having kid friends and I was very interested in medical things. I'd read her nursing journals and she would explain things. I knew a whole lot about the subject by age 12, when she got me in volunteering with the candy stripers. Because I had basically grown up at that particular hospital, most people knew me, so I was given jobs that most candy stripers couldn't do, but nothing that would violate anything legal. My first job at age 17 was at that hospital and then I worked there in a patient care area for several years and while I was in nursing school. I quit nursing school when I was pregnant with my first and then quit the job to take care of him and never went back to either. The point of that long rambeling paragraph is that I am used to a LOT of options medically. Here, nobody seems to understand the dangers of not having them. The minutes lost in transport of a trauma victim can mean the difference between life and death. I've actually talked to several people down here since we moved, trying to see if I could rustle up a group of people to help raise money for the hospital. Believe it or not, almost everybody I talked with had about the same answer. If it's Gods will youll survive, hospital or not.

See what I'm up against? They spend more on their churches here than on their health care.

PaganMom

Oh, almost forgot. My girls are 13 and 16. We are now just waiting on them to break out. They couldn't have possibly been more exposed to this than they have been unless they were injected with the live virus. So, they will get it.

PaganMom