Mack's crazy February

Mack had QUITE the month. It's a long, complicated story, but at the beginning of the month he came down with a weird rash like area. It was in a strange place and didn't look like any rash I had ever seen. We had my Mom look at it and Mrs. Dena and tried to treat it ourselves for a while using various medicines and home remedies. It became obvious that this was not working and so I started to worry that it could be staph or another similar type bacteria.

The next morning, he suddenly threw a high fever between the time I left my house and got to Mrs. Dena's and quickly it was obvious that he did not feel well. I took him to the doctor (worried that the rash was indeed a bad type of bacteria and that it was linked to the fever), and had him looked at by four different doctors/nurse practitioners that day. Unfortunately, not one of these pediatric practitioners could tell me what it was so they did multiple cultures and blood tests and said they would put us on several medications prevantitively. They mentioned several other super scary possibilities but told me not to worry until we got the test results back. For any of you that know me, you know that telling me not to worry (especially about my children's health) is a lost cause.

Five days later I still couldn't get them to give me any results over the phone so we went back in for a re-check and to get the pathology reports. The rash had started to clear up and his fever was gone, so we assumed we were on the right track. The results from the blood tests all showed nothing and the culture came back as a bacteria that no one working in this pediatric office had seen before. In fact, it was so rare that when the doctor came in to meet with me, she was having to research it just to find out what it was. She said that she needed to speak with the head Physician and then would call me the next day. After a long day of waiting, the head doctor called and said that he had never encountered this bacteria before and that he could only assume that it was a cross contamination. They still had no answers for what caused the initial problem and no other answers for us about what M had been dealing with.

About five days later, Mack woke up with his cheeks looking like this:

and his ear looking like this:

along with a rash covering almost all of his body. I still wasn't convinced that this wasn't related to the weirdo problems we had been having for the previous week, so Marcus took him to the doctor on Sunday morning while I was leading worship. The doctors there diagnosed him with Fifths Disease, which, by the way, sounds and looks a lot scarier than it really is.

His rash looked terrible for about two-three days and since then  he has been healthy and happy!

I'm so grateful that whatever was wrong with him initally has been resolved and I'm grateful for the friends and family that kept me calm while waiting for the answers to come. I said this to Marcus last week and I think it to myself each day...As long as we are all healthy, we can handle anything else that comes our way. There is not a day that goes by when I don't praise God for the health and healing that He has sent to us. I don't ever want to take that for granted.

Love y'all!