A Pox on Your House

They don't give you fancy quarantine signs these days, but we do have an official diagnosis: Quinn has chickenpox. We noticed a little something on her chin last night and this morning Evelin took off Quinn's pyjamas to find a bunch of red spots with little blisters inside of them. Evelin and I both had this pox as kids; Celeste has had the vaccine; Quinn's just the lucky one ...

We're not sure where she got it; the doctor said it could have been from some random person on the airplane or in the airport or from someone while we were in Louisiana. But she wasn't contagious herself until this weekend ... and we have another week or two before she's in the clear.

And the fun part for Quinn, since she's still under 12 months, she'll still have to get the vaccine. This early of an exposure isn't considered effective in ensuring immunity into later life.

UPDATE: Evelin corrected me: We have preliminary diagnosis of chickenpox (Varicella simplex). If the pox spots continue to increase/spread for the next day or two — and as of this morning it looks like they are — then we get an official diagnosis.

Of course, even without an official diagnosis, I did get one humorous misunderstanding of what Quinn has. I e-mailed by French translator/proofreader about the issue we have in production and mentioned that I was out of the office that afternoon because one of my girls has chickenpox, putting the word la varicelle. This morning I got an e-mail from her: "I am glad you had a good diagnosis for your little daughter and I guess an adequate treatment for smallpox." La variole is close to la varicelle, but I imagine the doctor would have been more concerned ...

And thinking of the doctor, he told Evelin that because of the chickenpox vaccine most of the people currently in med school (and more than a few now in practice) would not recognize a case of chickenpox because they'd never seen an infection before. This Evelin and me to start wondering if we should contact some of the local medical schools to see if they'd like to help fund Quinn's college fund in return for letting her model the disease to students ...