escarlatina...

One thing I love about my job is that I am constantly learning new things about history and globalization and Central American politics…and, as it turns out – bizarre medical mishaps. Many of you may remember the post last year about the ‘fire plants’ that gave one of our students second degree burns. This year, we started off right away with an equally strange case. One of the girls let me know that she was getting a rash, but we weren’t all that concerned at first…until it started to spread, *quickly*. Never in my life have I seen a rash so red and so expansive.

Over the course of the following week, this trooper of a student visited three different doctors and received a different diagnosis from each, first it was an allergy/a reaction to her malaria meds, then is was Rubela, then is was an allergic reaction again, and finally, at the last doctor she was treated for Scarlet Fever. Scarlet Fever? I don't think I've heard of anyone getting that since Beth from Little Women got it from the baby next door.

I'm still skeptical about the whole thing; she was treated for so much stuff that who knows what it actually was. But the antibiotics for Scarlet Fever worked. And as she started to heal, the skin started to peel (see pic of arm in process on the left). I repeat, she had a marvelous attitude through the sleepless nights of burning and the shedding and re-shedding of her skin and we're thrilled to report that she's no longer losing skin and the redness has almost entirely disappeared.