Saturday, April 9, 2016

A pox on your family

The girls have recently gotten chickenpox due to Sweden's refusal to vaccinate against it. The country's reasoning is a bit muddy to me but that is not the point of this post. This post is to highlight and disseminate my children's suffering during this time!

A time line:

Day one: Wooooo! We are home and can play with neighbor cat. Feeling good!

Day 1 part 2: Sun's shining and we're dancing!

Day 1 part 2 part 2: DANCE!

Day 2: Ya. Things are okay today. Not great but hey it is movie night!

Day 2 part 2: The heck you doing dad?

Day 2 part 3: Picture of pox's progression.



Day 3: Life sucks.

Day 3 part 2: Life sucks a lot. Things can't get worse.

Day 4: Hey look, things got worse.

Day 4 part 2: Just what I always wanted! A pair of chickenpox on my eye lids!

Anyways, the pox hit Inara much harder than Alba. Inara ran a fever for about three days and had a large number of pox from her head to her toes (literally). I have made a helpful graph showing the progression of the dots.


This graph was compiled for SCIENCE! As you can see from this graph Inara got hit by a truck and Alba by a moped. These numbers reflect the minimum number of pox as I was unable to get an accurate count of how many they had on their scalps which, as is apparent from the pictures, likely would have added 5-20 to the count. The count stopped because I had to go to work and the other member of this parental team was less interested in SCIENCE. I am comfortable that the numbers remained largely stable after day 4, counts clearly show a leveling off after day 3.

The girls have not been back to school yet as the last of their oozing yellow pustules had yet to crust over until today. Inara hasn't had a fever for about four days and Alba never really had one so they are generally active and happy again. Neither one of them was particularly itchy though, so that was nice.

Run down on the numbers:

  • Grand total days missed from work that the Swedish government is on the hook for: 4
  • Days missed from daycare: 4
  • Number of likely scars from the pox: 1 (On Alba's nose).
  • Minimum total pox acquired: 530
  • Max fever: 38,5 C (101.3 F)

4 comments:

  1. Thanks for the post. graph and commentary, so glad things are on the up swing

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  2. Wow, no vaccinating is quite incredible. When Brent was in the 3rd grade a classmate died from them. Glad you only suffered some and was able to get some science from it!

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  3. Wow, no vaccinating is quite incredible. When Brent was in the 3rd grade a classmate died from them. Glad you only suffered some and was able to get some science from it!

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  4. I have had some heated discussions with some Swedes regarding the vaccination issue. They mostly noted that no one died from chickenpox (even after I showed them that people, both adults and child DO die from it) and that the side effects from the vaccine were worse than the pox itself (which, again, I was able to show to be false). I convinced no one and merely down-rated my perceived intelligence rating for those people. I was, as you say, able to gather data and test my own immunity.

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