Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Hives!




Yesterday evening I noticed that Anderson was scratching his stomach and it looked really red.  I went over and lifted his shirt up and I saw that he had a ton of bumps everywhere that looked like bites.  It was all over his belly, chest, and under his arms near his armpits.  The above picture is what I saw.  He had a few "bite" marks on his legs.  I called Christopher right away because I didn't know what it could be.  He suggested that we give Anderson a bath, which I did.  The bath stopped him scratching himself which was good because he was making it worse.  We decided that we would let him sleep on it and if the "bites" were not better in the morning we would take him to the doctor.  I should also mention that we were racking our brains trying to figure out what it was.  We had gone to a new playground and we thought that maybe there were some fleas in the sandbox that got under his shirt and bit him all up.  Or we were thinking it was bed bugs because he had taken a nap in our bed.  I wasn't so sure about the bed bugs because only he had bites and the rest of us did not.  

That evening Anderson slept horribly because he kept scratching himself.  He must have been so itchy.  He was scratching the back of his neck and wrists a lot.  These were the only two spots that were available to him.  I put him in some footie pajamas so that he couldn't scratch his tummy and chest easily.  In the morning the rash looked worse so we made an appointment for him to go see the doctor.  

Our doctor walked right in and said that he has hives and must have had an allergic reaction to something and this is the cause.  We talked about what Anderson did for the day and everything that he ate, which happened to be all stuff he had eaten before.  I did mention how he just finished his round of antibiotics the day before this and she said that there is a very good chance that he is allergic to amoxicillin or the dye in the pink amoxicillin.  I guess that there are delayed allergic reactions to antibiotics that can happen after they have been given.  I think that this might be the case.  Although he had an ear infection not too long ago and he took amoxicillin with no reactions, but I also don't remember that one being pink.  

Our course of action now is to give him Children's Claritin once a day until the hives are gone.  This should be about three days.  At the same time we need to give him Children's Benadryl every six hours for a couple of days to help with the itching.  This poor kid has been taking medicine non-stop!  I also have to say that looking at the ingredients on medicines I am really appalled at what is in them!  Dye, preservatives that have been found to be bad, high fructose corn syrup!  It just really puzzles me why medicine that is supposed to make someone get better has a whole bunch of crap in it!  

We were also instructed to put loose clothes on him and try to avoid baths because those could make the hives worse.  If he has another bacterial infection that requires antibiotics we will have to see what we would like to do.

Anderson has been a good trooper!  Below is a video of him at the doctor's office today.  It is hard to see the hives because of the poor quality, but it looked really bad!

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