Turning a corner

Since posting last week about my son getting eczema herpeticum, things got even worse when my daughter came down with the same thing. I felt nothing short of desperate. To know both of my children now may battle with this scary infection for life kills my mama heart.

My daughter's personality has changed so drastically in the last week. She has these fits of, well, I don't even know how to describe it. Rage? Frustration? I'm not even sure. I wish I could know what's going on inside her little head. What she's feeling. She'll just start going crazy, screaming, repeating things over and over, kicking, sometimes biting, hitting, slapping. You can't talk sense into her. We have to physically restrain her sometimes. It's terrible. Terrible. I find myself just desperately begging God to relieve my children of this. Relieve my daughter of whatever is causing her such distress.

I'm pretty confident it's the medicine she's on. She is on both an antiviral and an antibiotic, and one of the side effects of the antiviral is aggressive behavior. It just breaks my heart, because I want my normal daughter back. We only have a few more days of medicine to take for the eczema herpeticum, so I am praying things return to normal at that point.

However, bad news aside, now that their EH has healed up, I have some absolutely amazing photos to share!

The picture on the left was Landon at his all-time worst a few weeks ago. The one on the right was him as of this morning.

The picture of Adalyn on the left was after her eczema had started healing a little bit, so not her worst, but as you can see on the right, which was taken a few days ago, she has healed SO much more. Unfortunately her body is still covered in eczema, though it is slowly getting better. Her face, though, is just incredible. If I had to pick body OR face, I would pick body every day of the week because at least it's a little hideable. I haven't been able to take them in public for ages because people always comment on them.

"What's wrong with your face?!"
"What did you eat?"
"Ew, look at your face! It's bleeding! Gross!" <--a young child who really doesn't know better

You get the point. We've become hermit crabs. So now, to see things improving, to know we're so close to being able to go out in public? HUGE.

We did take them out on Monday, and while I wish I could say it was a success, it wasn't. It was a success in that not one single person commented on their skin, but a failure in that they both had flare-ups and emotional breakdowns once we got home. My husband and I were practically in tears because of how much they broke down. We bathed them as soon as we got home, but in my mind, this was such a tell-tale sign that detergent plays a huge role in their eczema.