When I picked Kaylee up from day care yesterday, there was a small note at the bottom of her daily sheet that said she had a rash on her bottom. Usually they don’t note these things unless the rash is bad enough that they have to stop putting diaper rash ointment on it.
Wait a second, did I just say what you think I said? Yes, I did.
Day care centers are not allowed to put ointment on babies’ bottoms if they become red or blistered from diaper rash; they’re only allowed to use ointments as a preventative measure. As long as the baby’s bottom is still pink, the kid can be dipped in a vat of ointment. But once a rash actually develops, and the baby is in real pain, the day care teachers aren’t allowed to do anything.
I understand the point behind the rules. If a baby has severe diaper rash, complete with ugly blisters that could get infected, then you don’t want a non-medical professional just slathering cream on the baby’s butt and hoping the problem will go away. Severe problems need to be looked at by doctors, and I get that.
But it’s hard to remember the point behind the rules when you get your baby home for the day, change her diaper, and find her covered with such a large, fiery-red rash that she screams when you touch her with a baby wipe. Because when Kaylee’s teacher isn’t allowed to treat her diaper rash, it only gets worse throughout the day, leaving me to coat her with ointment at night. Then I have to cross my fingers that it goes from red to pink by the following morning so she doesn’t have to suffer for another day.
So today I’m kind of angry. I’m not angry with the day care teacher for following the rules that handcuff her, but I am angry with the rules that do the handcuffing. Is this really necessary? Can we really not trust a child care professional to put a little ointment on a baby’s bottom? Do we really live in such a litigious society that day care centers can’t use Desitin for fear of being sued?
I guess so.
And ok, I have to admit that I’m a little mad at the day care, too. From the daily report, it looks like they stopped treating her at about noon, which means she spent almost six hours with a painful rash that wasn’t being taken care of. As I said, I’m not mad that they followed the rules, but I am angry that they didn’t call me to let me know what was going on. They may be limited by the regulations, but I’m not, and I could have stopped by to coat my baby in enough zinc oxide to last the rest of the year. A tiny little note at the bottom of the form? That just doesn’t seem good enough.
I did, however, arrive at her day care this morning to find that an accident report had been filed yesterday because another kid “bit” her on the head. The kid most likely didn’t even have teeth, and Kaylee didn’t have a mark or anything.
This they tell me about.
Kaylee gets gummed on the head, and they write up a report, complete with a computer alert that won’t let me sign her in for the day unless I sign a form acknowledging that I’m aware of the gumming incident. But she gets a horrible, painful rash the size of Texas on her butt, and no one says a word.
I don’t have any sort of witty conclusion to this post, because I’m mostly just working through my anger by ranting.
So…
Grrrrr. Bleh.
The end.
How about, instead of “The end,” “the fiery red, screamingly painful end”? Ok, that’s probably still just ranting. Poor baybee.
The absolute best way to treat diaper rash is a mix of hydrocortisone cream and neosporin (I’m a fan of the Neosporin with pain relief kind, it does seem to help). Desitin is just a protectant, it doesn’t have anything in it that will treat diaper rash. A & D is a little better, but the whole idea of both of those is just to keep the moisture off the junk. That’s one of the reasons the daycare can’t use it, because it can interferre with the healing process. So just mix up some neosporin and hydrocortisone cream, about 50/50, and smear that on there. Change her as often as you can, and if possible, let her go without a diaper- trust me, just put a blanket down with a towel or two underneath and let her pee on the floor, it’s totally worth it, because then you don’t have to use anything to clean it. If it starts to smell bad (like yeast) or you see any blister looking things, then it’s bacterial and you need to take her to the doctor to get some heavy duty stuff.
Holy crap- I just wrote a term paper on diaper rash. I swear, I used to be interesting. Anyway, good luck! LB
Thanks for those tips, and I’ll make sure to use them at home. But I really don’t know how to help her when she’s got a rash during the week, when she’s at daycare most of her waking hours. There’s no way the daycare will let her crawl around naked, and they won’t smear a mixture of stuff that I bring from home on her, either. The only solution is to protect the diaper rash from getting worse by putting Desitin on it, and they won’t do that. So her rash gets exposed to dirty and wet diapers all day, which makes it dramatically worse and gives us that much more of a problem to try to solve in the evenings when she’s at home.
Two other things to note: Right now, it’s just red. No blisters or smellyness, so really it just needs to be allowed to heal. (In fact, we get it to go from red to pink in the evenings, only to have it go back to red during the day at daycare.) Second, Kaylee had a flu shot this morning, and while I was there, a doctor signed a form saying that the daycare is now officially allowed to put zinc oxide on a diaper rash. Hopefully the problem is more or less behind us now.