Saga of the Traveling Foot Infection

Our darling son Seth spends a lot of time on the street playing.  It has been so great for him to have make friends here in the neighbourhood, learning the language and just plain rough-housing the way active kids do.  The past three weeks he has been semi out-of-commission with a rogue infection, and our world seems to have revolved around it.

It started off innocently enough, a mosquito bite on the bottom of his foot that he scratched open, but the infection grew fast.  So we cleaned and bandaged, soaked and treated for two or three times a day, and around the fourth day the boil surrounded by a large painful red area finally drained.... for around five days.  Then it went from bad to worse.  It got reinfected, but with some mutant tropical bacteria that drained clearish-brown fluid and spread to other parts of his body, just for fun.  There were six other locations at one point, including a swollen middle toe exacerbated by a possible athlete's foot infection, and large scrape that grew on his shin.  Seth was getting up during the night, we continued with topical antibiotics and cleaning it, however on day eleven, when Shaun came down with a similar infection on his leg and condemned my zealous cleansing techniques as painful,  and Seth woke up at two in the morning itchy and in pain with a red streak heading away from the oozing, festering zone, with pus following it, that I sent the two of them to the small hospital in town.  The real kicker was realizing how infectious it was.  They returned with antibiotics and Seth was in definite better spirits.  The next day we realized that the red line was squiggling back, a sure sign of hookworm, which is excruciatingly itchy.  And the infection was following the worm hole.  So we started anti-microbial ointment as well.  Seth has missed almost three weeks of the four weeks of school since the World Cup, but started again today.  Because of how infectious it was, and how itchy it was, it was hard for him to keep it clean and not touch it, and we worried about him spreading it to others in his class.  However, it is almost healed now, with beautiful new pink skin, and we pray that no new infection gets caught up in the cracks of open skin left.

Here's a picture diary of the ordeal.  I don't think it is that graphic, but if you don't like looking at wounds and discussing disgusting infections, I suggest you move on to another post ;)

For my future reference, Seth and Shaun were prescribed Keflex.

Initial boil.... no biggie.

The start of the mutation....

The start of the spread....

The swollen toe that was so itchy.... 

Seth scratched it open which caused more infection.

The wormhole, filling with infection...

Wrapped around his foot.  Poor guy, it was so itchy and he had painful spots everywhere.  If you look at his other foot here you can dimly see two other smaller spots which were also infected.

Almost healed after a week on antibiotics.

Yay!  Seth can go back to school!

So, I've been a bit preoccupied to post, but I'm getting there.  Hopefully, notwithstanding more infections or the like, I'll be able to post again this week.