Well, it does if you're a 7 year old boy

My son on Wed. said when he got home that he didn't feel well, was tired and wasn't really hungry. He slept from 3:30 til 8pm, ate a little and played for about 20 minutes and went back to bed. No fever, nothing. Throat looked great, not even a cough. He sneezed - but it was a sneeze, nothing more.

Thursday he wakes up happy and energetic - I checked for fever and looked at his tonsils and all was well. Heck, he even played the Wii for a bit before school. Came home still happy and healthy, but has a reddish hue to his chin...like he had fallen asleep on the bus again with his head rested on the seat in front of him, his backpack or his hands. Still, everything was just fine.

Friday he was a bit pinkish, like a heat rash. Tonsils, fever, all signs absent. I told him I'd call the school about the rash thing, it looked like allergic hives but they weren't itching, and they were few...more like a bugbite or two. He ate breakfast and was hyper and silly, all was well.

About 40 minutes go by, the nurse calls to tell me he has to be picked up because he's running a very low fever, 100.3 - but she said too, there was nothing else with the fever..just warm. She said his tonsils looked great, and he felt just fine, but school policy is for anything over 99.0 goes home. We got him and he was fine. The post before this about the 2 1/2 hour walk all over the area? That's the day. We got back and he had a light pink sunburn 'tan line' where his shirt was. No fever, he was normal til he left to his dad's for the weekend.

I got a call last night, a rather angry one wanting to know *why* I didn't tell his dad sooner about his strep infection. Said his fever was 101.4, and his tonsils looked horrendous - spots, swollen almost shut, and the works. He said he saw this within 2 hours of having him home. I'd checked him just 3 hours before! There were

*no *signs! In any case, my son looks like a human tomato - he has scarlet fever due to an almost week old strain of strep.

Now, this means the very day that he said "I had a big lunch so I'm not hungry, we played outside and had PE there too, so I'm tired". I asked about his red chin a few days past, he said he'd kept falling in the grass while learning football. (He's allergic to grass, gets the same exact looking rash.) And those things are supposed to make me freak out and demand a trip to the ER, or the doctor which would require $75 *and* that my ex take a day off for it, and my son miss school. Always told I over-react, I opted to wait for symptoms showing something..anything. Apparently, I wasn't too smart. A trip to the doctor revealed a severe infection that had been there for about a week? Now I feel like a neglectful mom, I should have known. I'm empathic, how did I miss this?

So the end tale is that my son is still at his dad's, happy that the antibiotics taste more like bubblegum and less like metallic sardines. His dad only buys the big giant plastic tub of ice cream usually, but when my boy is sick, he gets to choose his own. For my son, this means his favorite, frozen yogurt. This is his 7th time having scarlet fever alongside strep in the last 2 years. It's the 4th time in one year. He has picked his favorite cold treat every time. Does he care he's sick? Nope. Is he complaining? Not at all. But you know what?

I asked him what he thought of all this and his reply just made me laugh. He looks like a human strawberry and can't hardly swallow, but his sum of everything was:

"I don't mind it really - the medicine's way less nasty than last time, and besides-Scarlet fever frozen yogurt kicks butt !"

Next time I get sick, I think I'll start at traditional something for myself , just a little silver lining that when summed up with feeling lousy , still comes out on top. Well, here's to hoping that tomatos and cherries remain your foods and not your complexions!

Lilli