Adventures in Chicken Pox

So Jack has chicken pox.

If you don't have kids, you probably don't know this, but due to the accessibility of a vaccine, chicken pox has been almost completely eradicated. Yet my child still managed to get it, even though he's HAD the vaccine. What amazes me is not that Jack GOT chicken pox, but how he was treated for it. Here's what went down:

A few days ago we started noticing that Jack had a lot of "mosquito bites". Weird, considering we're pretty much hunkered down in the AC 24/7. Then he had a runny nose, cough, and fever, but that seemed normal, too, because our family from Tennessee was just here, and one of my cousins had a nasty cold.

When the "bites" didn't go away, I decided he had chicken pox, despite the fact he had the vaccine already. David insisted I was insane, but Jack's fever was getting worse, so I called the doctor and booked an appointment, telling the receptionist, "I think my son might have chicken pox".

This is where it got weird:

The receptionist got really serious and said, "Ok... when you get here, DO NOT come into the office. Call from your car and someone will come out to you." Hmm. Ok? So I show up to the office and call from the car just as I was instructed, and my doctor comes out within seconds, covered in plastic. She looked like an extra from the movie "Outbreak". She looked Jack over for about 3 seconds and announced, "Yep, it's chicken pox. We're going to bring him into an exam room, but we have to go in the back entrance."

So instead of walking through the front office, they take us in via what appeared to be a fire escape and took us straight to an empty room. And I mean, literally, an empty room. The room was stripped of EVERYTHING. No toys, no medical instruments: even those ridiculous posters with diagrams of ear canals were stripped off the walls. There was nothing in the room but a small wooden stool to sit on.

The doctor checked him out to make sure he didn't have any other infections, and as she was doing this, one of the other doctors in the practice came in. Now, I should preface this part of the story by pointing out that this guy is probably in his mid-to-late forties. He's probably been practicing medicine for at least 15 years.

And he came in to look at Jack because he had NEVER SEEN CHICKEN POX.

Apparently chicken pox is like the Sasquatch of diseases now. People have heard of it, and a few crazy rednecks claim to have sighted it, but other than that, it's basically an urban legend.

They then ushered us back out the "special exit" and sent us home with an instruction sheet and well-wishes.

The whole experience totally blew my mind. For starters, I had chicken pox myself as a kid, and it was no big deal. EVERYONE got chicken pox. I can even remember a few totally insane individuals who used to throw "Pox Parties", wherein people would bring their healthy children over for a party with a sick kid. The motivation behind this was that the earlier a child gets chicken pox, the less-severe the case is, so by forcing their kid to get the disease early on, they were sparing him/her a worse case. My own parents did not do this (probably because it's slightly inhumane and smacks of Munchausen by Proxy), but still, it was not unheard of.

Fast-forward 27 years, and chicken pox is all but extinct and considered highly dangerous. It was the most hilarious spectacle I have ever witnessed. It was like something straight out of "Andromeda Strain". You'd think he had Ebola or leprosy or something.

Since I was born with the inability to remain serious in the face of absurdity, I started cracking up. I'm laughing hysterically while trying to ask the doctor what the big deal is, and she explained that we now know chicken pox is a very serious illness and highly fatal to newborns. Since babies dying isn't funny, I got myself back under control, but still, the entire experience was completely surreal. By the time we left, I half expected to get a call from the President, ordering an official quarantine of the entire city. And after what we'd just been through, I wouldn't have considered it weird.

So anyway, Jack and I are now under strict orders not to leave the house until the bumps "scab over" (ewwww, right?), which should be within a week. And since there's nothing more fun than being stuck in your house with a sick kid, I'm anticipating some brushes with insanity. And lots of Barney.