Bleach Bathing

That looks an awful lot like Beach Bathing, doesn't it?  Beach bathing sounds much more enticing than bleach bathing, but, unfortunately, as it's winter and I don't live near a beach and for other reasons I've been doing bleach bathing.

This goes back to the abscesses and the MRSA and the staphylococcus bacteria we all have on our skin.  When I was at the hospital with my son getting his abscess drained and packed the nurse said she would give us some suggestions on how we could improve and reduce our chances of recurrence of skin-based infections.

One thing I've been told again and again by health care professional after healthcare professional is that I shouldn't feel guilty about my son getting his abscess.  And yet I do.  But back to the advice I received.  I was told MRSA is not the infection with the stigma it used to have.  It's not something that's exclusive to hospital patients with compromised immune systems.  It's also not an infection that is hard to address with antibiotics.

MRSA stands for Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus Aureus.  The resistant part means it doesn't respond to some of the traditional antibiotics that work on other strains of staph.  But there are, in fact, antibiotics that do work on MRSA and they work quickly and well.  So hearing getting comforting advice from multiple doctors made me feel better about the whole situation.

The second thing I heard was that they see MRSA infections in children regularly and that sometimes cross-contamination occurs on playgrounds or in school as the bacteria can live for up to seventy-two hours.  So I felt a bit of relief again that maybe I wasn't a completely incompetent mother for letting my son get this terrible abscess.

Where was I, ah yes, Bleach Bathing, so the nurse and doctor who were there for the procedure said that statistics have shown people who swim regularly in chlorinated pools have a significantly less occurrence of staph-based skin infections.  (/wave to my niece, Olivia, who is an avid swimmer.)  They suggested giving our children a bath with a cap-full of bleach once a week.

That sounds drastic.  Bleach?  Directly in their bath?  Won't their skin start to fall off?  No, it won't because in a bath, one cap full of bleach is less than one tenth the concentration in a chlorinated pool.  So relax and be happy about the benefits instead of being worried about the side-effects.

We now have a special bath bleach bottle and not only have the children been bathing in bleach, I have been too.  I won't argue with medical statistics when they're to the benefit of my family.

The Big Boy Update:  Mickey Mickey everywhere.  Toddler's will extrapolate anything.  Today he was using Mimi's hole punch and he punched three holes into a page that already had small holes in the edge.  I saw him point at the paper and say, "Mickey Mouse!"  This is what he saw: 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Hidden sleeper.  For some reason in the past week she's decided she wants to sleep on the floor, in the corner, behind the chair, laying on her legs in pike position.  Why she wants to sleep in the corner hidden I don't know.

Someone Once Said:  If you happen to be one of the fretful minority who can do creative work, never force and idea; you’ll abort it if you do. Be patient and you’ll give birth to it when the time is ripe. Learn to wait.