Healing Hand, Foot and Mouth Rash: Parenting Tips for Soothing Itch and Preventing Infection
It was 9:17 pm last Tuesday, and I was folding the third load of dinosaur-print pajamas that week when my four-year-old padded into the laundry room, barefoot, one hand stuffed under her opposite arm, scratching hard enough to make her shoulder jump. She’d had a low-grade fever and runny nose for three days, we’d written it off as the latest cold from her preschool class, so I didn’t think much of it until she propped her foot on my knee to show me. Tiny, fluid-filled blisters clustered along her arch and between her toes, bright red against the pale of her skin. Hand, foot and mouth, I thought. Here we go again.
This was my second time going through it with a kid, so I didn’t panic like I did the first time, when I stayed up until 2 am scrolling through every worst-case scenario online. But I still forgot one big thing: the virus itself is usually mild, it runs its course in a week, but the rash is what makes everyone miserable for those first four days. I tried calamine lotion first, like I did with my oldest, but within five minutes she was crying that it was sticky, it itched worse, and she didn’t want it on her hands anymore. It got all over the couch cushions anyway, so I wiped it off and started trying to figure out what actually works.
I shot a quick message to our pediatrician, who wrote back 10 minutes later with a list of small, low-fuss steps that I ended up using every day that week. The biggest thing she reminded me was that the rash will heal on its own – you can’t kill the coxsackievirus that causes it with antibiotics or creams, so the whole point of care is just to keep your kid comfortable and stop them from scratching open blisters and getting a secondary infection.
First, I trimmed my daughter’s nails. I did it while she watched Bluey, 10 seconds per finger, and filed the edges smooth so she couldn’t break skin even if she tried. For nighttime, when she itched in her sleep and couldn’t stop herself, I grabbed a pack of cheap white cotton baby socks I’d gotten for a craft project months earlier, cut the toe end off each one, and slipped them over her hands like loose, soft gloves. No scratchy plastic mittens, no sticky lotion, and she didn’t hate them enough to pull them off in the night. That one change cut down on middle-of-the-night wake-ups from scratching more than anything else I tried.
For the rash on her feet, which was the itchiest, I started doing 10-minute cool compresses twice a day while we read picture books. Just a clean washcloth soaked in cool tap water, wrung out enough that it didn’t drip, laid over her feet. It took the itch down almost immediately, no sticky residue, no special products I had to run to the store for. When one blister popped on her heel, I dabbed a tiny bit of plain petroleum jelly on it, put a loose band-aid on just to keep it from rubbing against her sock, and that was it. I skipped all the fancy anti-itch sprays I saw advertised online – the $15 organic lavender one I bought for my oldest didn’t do a thing, so I didn’t bother this time around.
Two days in, she developed a few blisters on her bottom, which I’d forgotten is a super common spot for hand, foot and mouth rash to show up. The stretchy polyester underwear she usually wears rubbed the blisters wrong, and she kept saying it hurt. I swapped her for the loose 100% cotton underwear I keep for sleepovers, and dabbed a tiny bit of over-the-counter 1% hydrocortisone on the most irritated spots once a day for two days. Our pediatrician said that’s fine as long as you don’t use it for more than three days without checking in, and it calmed the redness and itching fast.
She kept begging to go outside and play with the neighbor kids, and I wasn’t sure if that was okay. The pediatrician said as long as her fever was gone, she could go out as long as I kept two things in mind: keep her feet in loose socks so dirt from the playground doesn’t get into any broken blisters, and keep her out of direct midday sun, which can irritate the rash and leave darker spots after it heals. She ended up just sitting on the porch coloring chalk for an hour every afternoon, which was enough to keep her from going stir crazy, and we didn’t have any issues.
I think a lot of new caregivers get overwhelmed with hand, foot and mouth rash because there’s so much conflicting advice online. Some people say you have to keep the rash totally dry, some say you need to bathe them every hour, some push expensive special creams. But from what I’ve lived through two times now, the simple, low-cost stuff works best. Lukewarm oatmeal baths are fine if your kid likes them, just skip scented soap or bubble bath that will irritate broken skin. If the itching is so bad your kid can’t sleep, a weight-appropriate dose of children’s Benadryl at night (never during the day, it makes them too groggy) is fine per most pediatricians. And if you see any signs of infection – pus oozing from blisters that doesn’t stop, increasing redness around a blister, a fever that sticks around longer than three days – that’s when you call your doctor, right away.
Today, a week after she first showed me that blistered foot, the rash is almost gone. The blisters have crusted over and flaked off, she’s back to running around the backyard barefoot and stealing goldfish crackers off my plate. I still see one of the cut-up cotton sock gloves sitting on my nightstand, I keep meaning to toss it in the trash but haven’t gotten around to it. Hand, foot and mouth goes through every preschool and daycare, eventually. It’s messy, it’s itchy, it’s one more thing to add to your list of things to handle when you’re already tired. It doesn’t need a fancy fix. Most of the time, the rash heals on its own, as long as you keep your kid comfortable and stop the scratching. Next month, I’ll probably forget all the little tricks I used this week, until the preschool sends out another exposure email, and I dig them back up again.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Healing Hand, Foot and Mouth Rash: Parenting Tips for Soothing Itch and Preventing Infection