Chicken Pox - really bad scabbing

[BonoboBabies]

Hi

My 3 year old has chicken pox, she is at the stage now where the itchiness has gone and the spots are scabbing. The problem is she scratched a lot of them and they were very red and sore, she also had a very high temperature, up to 40.2 at one point. My GP surgery was closed for holidays so I kept ringing out of hours GP every night for three days to see if I should do anything extra like get antibiotics or cream to put on other than calamine for the spots that were really inflamed, but kept being told no, it was normal. I was really worried about one particular cluster of spots near her eye that was weeping, swollen and very sore and so took her down to walk in centre (we were quarantined in a separate area before I get any comments about not taking my child out with chicken pox!), but I was eventually told just to keep giving calpol, childrens nurofen and piriton which I had been doing anyway.

Her temperature is back to normal today and she is much more perky (day 6) but the scabs are here now and they are huge, surrounded by red marks. In fact they actually look like wounds all over her body and face. I even took pictures of her face to my own GP this morning and she just said put some savlon on.

Soo...the big question is, when will the scabs fall off and is it inevitable that all of these really big scabs will scar? Is there anything I can do now to minimise this? She is covered in calamine still to stop her trying to pull off the scabs but not sure if there is anything else I can do? Have bought vitamin E oil for when scabs have fallen off to rub in.

Just feeling like I should have tried to do more to stop her scratching them - tried to put gloves on her but she freaked out and kept pulling them off, screamed when I tried to put calamine on (although she got better at this!)..tried porridge run under bath water, all sorts, but she still managed to scratch!

I also have a 2 month old baby so have been running between my horribly sick 3 year old and my 2 month old who is still feeding every 2-3 hrs, so its been a stressful week. GP has tried to reassure me that as she is breastfed she should not get CP or if she does it should just be a mild case, but obviously am worried sick about that too....lets just say its not been the best Christmas we have ever had :-).

Hi there,
Just spotted this thread.
Had similar experience during the summer, but my DD was put on antibiotics pretty early on. Really surprised and sorry to hear that you weren't offered them, especially with the red weeping wounds .
We were advised both by doc and pharmacist to ditch calamine lotion (in fact I've only used it once) and use either the cream version or any other cream to keep the scabs as moist and soft as possible, so they don't get dry and fall off prematurely. DD (slightly older - 4 - at the time) was very very good at not touching them, so you can imagine my sadness when she accidentally knocked off one of the largest scabs that was on her nose. She still has the scar and although hope but don't think it'll ever go away . All this happened in July, and still using pure rose hip oil on that one scar and it has improved a lot. I find it much better for her skin and for the healing process than vitamin E oil (tried that too). All her other scars are gone completely, one or two are ever so slightly hypopigmented (she is olive skinned). My son (2 at the time), however, healed so well. Even though he did pick a few on his face (mainly around the chin area), there is only one that remained slightly pitted (the one between his eyebrows). Initially, we were much worried about him scarring from CP due to him being fair skinned, but must say his skin type turned out to be better with regard to recovery from CP.
Hope your DD recovers well too!! Give some thoughts to using creams instead of the calamine lotion and once the wounds have healed try using rose hip oil. Not cheap, but well worth it!

Phonix

Thanks for your reply I haven't checked for a while to see if I had any responses. I actually took DD to a dermatologist and he said there was nothing we could do about scars other than keep them moisturised so he prescribed cetreban to put in her bath and use like soap. Sorry to hear about your DD, not sure if
It's any consolation but the doc we saw said cp can scar even if you don't scratch or pick the scab off, it's just the nature of the lesions. DD is stll looking
Very scarred, am hoping it will all fade over time.

Thanks for rosehip oil tip, i will give it a go