Oh, Shawn

Well, I made a dumb mistake. As you may recall, I'm now solely in charge of med runs, so every day I'm trying to keep kids happy while waiting for hours in hospital waiting rooms. Luckily, I came to Guatemala armed with my iphone and a love for reading stories, so usually it's not that hard to keep them occupied. The other day was a little different than usual though. Two of the kids from the babies house were covered in a serious rash with lots of open sores. They had a lot of discomfort so we decided to take them to the emergency room. Keeping three year olds busy is always hard, but when they're in pain it's almost impossible.

It took hours for the ER doctors to see them (I've come to realize that my first visit to the ER which took less than 20 minutes was a fluke, usually it takes just as long as everywhere else in the hospital). Finally the doctor came over, looked at their rashes and said, "Well, it's not contagious. I'm going to order a cream for them, I just want to wait for the other doctor to take a look." We were happy that we were finally going to get out of there, and we started playing and tickling and all the things that you usually do with three year olds.

We get our scripts and are getting the kids dressed when the other doctor walks by. "Yep, this is definitely scabies."

...

What?? Of course I had my hands all over these kids all morning. Wonderful.

Because things are tight financially, we decided to wait to see if I showed any symptoms before starting treatment. Every day I had to check my whole body for rashes, and for a while I thought I was in the clear.

No such luck. That, my friends, is the beginning of a scabies infection.

I was given the cream and had to do a head to toe treatment (not easy or enjoyable when you're a furball), but hopefully it'll do the trick. For the time being I get to chase around the other volunteers and gross them out with my cooties.