We seem to have survived the worst of the chicken pox. It's been a big shock to all of us. Life is starting to return to normal. Normal with less sleep and extra medications.
She went through a couple of days of abject misery. She'd spend most of her mornings very fragile, bawling at the slightest slight. She'd hardly sleep for more than an hour at a time, even at night. Which made the rest of us rather tetchy and on the verge of a bit of meltdown. After that it was just a fragile little girl, with occasional bouts of scratching.
I think the worst for her was being cooped up inside for a couple of weeks before it started and almost a couple of weeks afterwards. When L first took her outside to a park, she clearly missed being there. It's practically a month since she'd been and I feel sorry for having to be away for so long during the one time of year it's best to go.
The thing that helped the most was the camille lotion. I'm sure it helped her at least a little. But it really helped me a lot covering up her spots under an opaque white layer. Seeing the spots always brought on the guilt of having not avoided the exposure to the pox in the first place. It was weird that, after a year of my brain swimming in oxytocin, it just cut out and replaced with guilt. A bit of a depressing come down.
She's no longer contagious now. Most of her spots thankfully just faded away. There's a lot which have turned into scabs – mostly on her back and face. So we're just waiting for the scabs to fall off or disappear. We're still attacking her regularly with a combination of camille lotion for the scabs and vitamin E oil for where the scabs came off, plus the occasional antihistamine. And most of the laundry basket is black clothes with loads of the white camille splotches all over them.
