It’s easy to tell if your child has chicken pox, right? Everyone knows that chicken pox is a common childhood ailment that causes big red itchy spots to cover their skin, blister, and then scab over. Usually, a quick glance will identify chicken pox. Occasionally, though, it can be less straight forward.
Although chicken pox is most known for the “pox”, you are actually the most contagious for a couple of days before you break out in spots. That means that kids are passing around chicken pox before their parents even realize that they have it. If you pay attention, you may be able to tell that chicken pox is a possibility before they break out in spots.
Early chicken pox symptoms often seem like the flu and are often mistaken for other viral infections. My two daughters have chicken pox right now. My three-year-old started off with a nasty sounding cough, and then added other fluey symptoms to it, like a runny nose and a temperature. I actually took her into the doctor, and was told not to worry, that it was just a common virus and that she’d be back at preschool in a couple of days. A couple of days later, instead of getting better, her cough subsided, but red spots started to appear. It was chicken pox. Since then, I’ve talked to quite a few parents who have also said that their children developed a cough first, and then got the chicken pox spots.
Chicken pox is very contagious, so it’s very likely that if your children have been exposed to chicken pox, they will catch it. Keep this in mind and pay attention to more than just the spots. If you know that your children have come into contact with chicken pox, watch them for any signs of illness for the next month (chicken pox normally has an incubation period of two to three weeks, but it can be slightly shorter or longer). Even if it just seems like a cold or flu at first, keep in mind that it could actually be early signs of chicken pox. Also, chicken pox is most common in the spring.
Chicken pox normally shows up as big, mosquito-bite type sized red bumps that blister and eventually scab. However, it can be more difficult than you expect to identify them. When my daughters first broke out with chicken pox, it left us puzzling over whether they really had it. We knew that they’d been exposed to it multiple times in the past month or so, and then they broke out in a red, itchy rash. It just didn’t look like we expected it to (or how the pharmacist, who looked at it and decided that it “might” be chicken pox). Their spots were smaller than normal, and although some of them obviously blistered, you couldn’t tell on all of them. Also, the whole area around the spots was red, so it looked more rash-like than the normal polka-dot type look of chicken pox. The chicken pox virus can manifest itself in different ways, and can be affected by various factors, so your child’s spots might look slightly different from the typical chicken pox appearance.
If you’re not sure, but think that your child may have chicken pox, check with your doctor. Let them know if your child has, to your knowledge, been exposed to chicken pox.
