Inadvertant germ messanging

So the whole germ discussion we had before.... Since last week, my daughter has had pinkeye. It's the viral kind, not painful kind; it just makes her eyes red. So the message of pinkeye is that if you have a "germ" (at least this one) you will be socially stigmatized and not able to go to school. You will need to spray your hands with antibacterial spray before you touch babies. (And you really should try to stay away from babies.) If people know you have pinkeye they will want to keep you at arms length. You should really just stay home in your pajamas and watch TV.... In the middle of the fall out of the dreaded pinkeye, I've been trying to bring up that there are different kinds of "germs" and that some are easy to spread and some are hard to spread. I can't help thinking that this is confusing, given that we've been talking about her having a germ in her blood, and that it just requires being careful about putting on bandaids if she gets a cut...

And another thing! The policy of the school with regard to pinkeye actually is contrary to public health principles (and social justice!). The school district requires a student with pinkeye to be "under a doctor's care" getting treatment, which implies that the child is being treated with antibiotic eyedrops, which would be the case if the conjunctivitis were bacterial. But in most cases, it is viral, in which case antibiotic eyedrops are a waste of time. In that case, you have to bring a note from the doctor saying you are not contagious. But it takes several days for the infection to go away, and in the meantime the child is missing school and being shunned from society as a whole. So the incentive is for parents to pressure doctors to give them antibiotic eyedrops so children can go back to school and everyone can go on with their lives, red eyes and all. All that might be okay, but everyone using antibiotic eyedrops when there is no reason to will cause a rise in antibiotic resistant bacteria, leading to less treatable pinkeye. Not to mention the costs to the economy for doctor visits, unnecessary eye drops, missed work, missed school, etc etc etc. Obviously there are children with pinkeye attending my child's school. That's where my child got hers. What exactly is the problem with viral pinkeye? Children can learn with red eyes can't they? But they can't learn if they are excluded from school. I need to get the American Academy of Pediatrics on this... If they came out with a policy statement on lice, surely this is just as important!

BTW, she feels fine, she just has red eyes. :)

The Giant Bunny

Not long ago, my six year old daughter, who is positive, sat on my lap and told me a story. It went something like this:
"Once there was a giant bunny. He was so big that he reached all the way to the sky. One day he went to a place where there were lots of people. The giant bunny loved to play, so he hopped around, trying to play with the people that he saw. But some people were scared to play with him because he was so big, and they ran away from him. Other people wanted to play with him, but their friends told them not to play with him because he was big and they said he would hurt them. The bunny got sad because nobody liked him. He started to hop away, but he bumped into some houses and they broke. It was an accident, but some people got mad and started to yell mean things at the bunny. The bunny cried because it was not his fault he was so big, and he wanted the people to like him. Even though he was big, he was still just a bunny and wanted to have fun. But the people never wanted to give him a chance, so he went far away and never came back."

If the topic of the story was about anything else, I'd be focused on how proud I am that my baby girl, who is still learning the language, is able to independently create a story that's such a clear metaphor of her own life (yes, my princess is brilliant!). But I was too busy being sad. I often struggle with how to tread the fine line between the seemingly contradictory need to both shelter my daughter from the still-existing stigma of her illness and yet be "real" with her about it. On one hand, her HIV status is secondary, and possibly even tertiary, to the everyday aspects of life, and I don't see the need to be unneccesarily focused on it. However, it's always lingering subtly in the background, i.e. when she takes her meds, or when she says her prayers for her "mommy and daddy in Heaven." Generally, she is a happy, high-spirited child, and doesn't dwell on her status, but she is becoming more introspective as she gets older and hates injustice of any kind. It bothers me that life has to rob her of her innocence so early. I remember how it hurt when I first started becoming aware that I was "different" than others growing up, and that everyone didn't necessarily celebrate the difference. And even though my daughter has far more happy days than unhappy ones, as a mom it still hurts me that I can't fix all the ugly parts of her life. But I guess such is life.