hives

August 9

I took Lincoln to the park in the morning, and noticed that when we were done playing (when it started to get warm outside), he got some small hives on his cheeks. It was odd...he had never gotten hives. They went away and so I didn't think too much of it. Later, in the evening, we had a Relief Society activity at my neighbor's house. Derick was out of town, so Lincoln came with me. When we were done, he had the hives on his cheeks again. I started to really question what was causing them. I was sure hoping he wasn't having some kind of allergy to grass or something. That would be a bummer for a two-year-old. They seemed to go away again. After Lincoln had been asleep that night for about an hour or so, he woke up and sounded pretty upset. He was itching himself like crazy on his legs. I pulled down his pants and gasped. He had the worst/largest hives I had EVER seen. I didn't really know what to do. Derick was out of town (of course) but I knew that I needed to do something. I called my friend Hillary, whose husband is almost done with medical school. I didn't want to take Lincoln into the ER, because I didn't think it was necessary, but wanted to make sure first. Colby was totally willing to help out. They couldn't believe the size of the hives either. He basically just asked me if there was anything that could have caused it (nothing new that I could think of) and told me to give him benadryl. The benadryl helped, but the hives kept coming back every couple of hours and poor Lincoln was so miserable. It was a LONG night. The next day, I took Lincoln in to the pediatrician. She prescribed a stronger antihistamine, which really helped. They did a strep test, because they had been seeing a lot of strep and they thought that this was his body's reaction to it. Lincoln had also been complaining when eating or drinking, and so it made sense to me. The test was negative! What in the world?!? We never found out what caused the hives. He must have just been fighting off some kind of virus. I'm just so glad that they did go away and haven't come back since.

The lighting is really bad in this picture, but this is what Lincoln's legs looked like when I first saw the hives. They basically covered his entire legs.