My poor little girl

I almost cried as I dabbed soothing gel on the hundreds of chicken pox covering my seven-year-old’s body over the weekend.

How much can one little person’s skin take?

When she was two, the youngest developed the most bizarre, angry-looking rash. The doctor informed me there were actually two problems at play – eczema AND molluscum (the terribly infectious childhood plague NO-ONE talks about). The next two years of her life were ones of constant itching, interspersed with awful pain whenever a molluscum blister became infected.

And yet she’s always been the most cheery of my offspring. So relentlessly positive and upbeat.

Which is why it was so cruel when she became agoraphobic and eating disordered after a series of traumatic – for a four-year-old – events. A blue-bottle wrapped itself around her thigh, she choked on a piece of squid at a restaurant and a boy bit her so badly in the school playground that she carried a full set of his teeth marks on her arm for hours.

She lost the plot pretty badly after that. I’ve never felt so scared and powerless in my life.

But she fought back and three months later – after extensive and expensive treatment from a therapist – she was on the road to recovery. She went from being the most shy kid in her kindy class to the one who got an award for getting the whole class skipping. According to her teacher she actually has a vast chunk of year 2 skipping.

But her challenges weren’t over. A walnut allergy kicked in and she became one giant hive after eating a brownie. And the eczema continued to ravage her skin.

So I can’t quite believe she was cursed with chicken pox too. And not just any chicken pox – she’s the extremely rare case where, despite vaccination, she developed hundreds of pox all over her body.

She was a MESS. They were in her hair. They were in her mouth. They were in her armpits. They were on her palms, her lips, her eyelids.

Poor, poor little baby.

And yet retained her sly wit and her cheeky smile returned when the itching subsided after I finish gelling. As I stroked her hair and told her that I loved her, her indomitable spirit shone through.

Yesterday she was bouncing off the walls again with energy and joy. (Unfortunately her sister had come down with a vomitting bug, but that’s a whole other bad luck story.)

My youngest is going to be someone very special when she grows up. I can tell. She’s not going to let anything stand in her way.