Lions and tigers and hives! Oh, my!

Tuesday night after dinner, Asher developed these mosquito bite-looking bumps in large clusters on his arms, legs and tummy. We gave him some Benedryl and put some hydrocortisone cream on it, and it went away very easily. Wednesday morning (yesterday), he came downstairs when he woke up, and he was crying and just clawing at his legs and stomach. I looked, and the rash had gotten worse and spread.

I called our pediatrician, and of course he was out of the office yesterday. That meant a trip to Quick Care. I despise that place. The doctors who work there are just in a huge hurry to get you in and out and don't even take the time to really examine the problem or talk to you afterward. But I needed to do *something* for him, so I knew I needed to take him in.

So we dropped Kyrie off at school and went straight to Quick Care. There were at least 15 people in there already, so I braced myself for a long wait. And long it was! We waited for nearly an hour and a half before we were called back. The wait in the waiting room was made very interesting by a little girl puking into a bucket in one corner (why her mother didn't take her into the bathroom to puke is beyond me!), all the moms in the room instantly grabbing their children and not letting them leave their laps because of said puking girl, and a book about lions, tigers, bears, seals, penguins, etc. Asher loves books like that, so it was a blessing that we found it on the bookshelf before some other sickling grabbed it first.

When we were finally called back, the doctor took a quick look at Asher and said it was hives. That's what I figured they were, but I had to make sure. We have no history of any food allergies in our family, so I'm very skeptical that he suddenly developed an allergy to something he's had a million times before, but we're still going to be very careful about what he eats and keep a record to try and narrow it down. Asher has had a cough for the last week, so the hives *could* be caused by the virus. That makes more sense to me than him developing an allergy out of the blue, but I'll still be playing detective.

Asher came downstairs shortly after I'd put him down for his nap yesterday, and his face was just covered in hives. There were no hives anywhere but on his legs when I'd put him down 5 minutes before. Hives come and go very quickly, so what looked awful cleared up in about 5 minutes after I got more meds in him and put the cream on it. He's completely fine today and doesn't even have any Benedryl in him yet. I'm crossing my fingers that it's out of his system now so we can slowly start trying to figure out what the cause was. It's pretty frustrating!