Strep, it’s not just for throats anymore

Charlie’s not much of a talker. He rambles on endlessly, but the ratio of intelligible words to cute children mutterings is far tilted in the former.  When he kept saying ‘bum hurts’ we paid it a little attention, but didn’t panic.  On the upside, that is awesome that our child is speaking in British slang.  However, if he says that he wants to wear his fanny pack then we’ll stop his lessons there. Sure enough, his bottom was red, it looked like a little diaper rash, but we’d definitely seen worse.

There was also a small red rash on his willy. Again, it wasn’t alarming, just something that seemed out of place. “Well, just keep an eye on it and take him to the doctor if needed”, I said as I was leaving for my four-day business trip. This was one illness that I got the long straw in not experiencing.

The next day after preschool when Charlie was on the playground my wife noticed that he needed a diaper change. She casually looked in his diaper, saw that it was red and took him to the bathroom to investigate. His rash had gotten much worse and had developed a cut on his willy.  Nothing says lets go to the doctor like a surprise diaper like that, so she went to our pediatrician.

Our pediatrician is Captain Chill. He’s been practicing for dozens of years and has a delivery that really suits us. He was told about the cut, the rash on his willy and that his bottom was a little red. When he took Charlie’s diaper off he looked inquisitively at my wife and said, “Mom, I have no idea what this is”.

Puss had started to come from his diaper rash on his bottom. The puss was new from that morning and a complete surprise to everyone, but Charlie.

“Let me go ask one of my associates if they can assist me with this”, he said as he left the room.

He came back a couple of minutes later with another doctor. She looked at Charlie’s bottom and asked if Captain Chill had run a strep culture yet. I know, you say strep, I say throat, strep, throat, strep, throat.  That was pretty much the musical dialogue that the two doctors had.  Rectal strep was a whole new world of children’s infections.  I know strep in the throat, but having it anywhere near my rectum brought things to an all too clear version of a well known pain idiom.  Now I knew what our three year old was talking about.

He swabbed the area and went back to run the strep test.  Fun fact: it takes about 4X longer to get back the results from a rectal strep test than a throat test.  Inside my wife’s mind she was racing back and forth between how did this happen, hoping that the doctors weren’t judging her and thought about the fact that I had strep throat three times in the past month.

I was on the verge of never, and I mean never volunteering at the preschool or elementary school again.  What kind of a filthy school is this that gives me strep throat 3X in one month? People over 18 have a 5% chance of getting strep throat, so says Web MD thank you very much. I was either the world’s filthiest guy or Captain Unlucky. To that point I was oddly consoled by the fact that I was getting strep throat by changing our son’s diaper. It also pointed out that my hand washing technique needed serious amounts of improvement.