Photo: Brogan Thomas/Facebook
A 22-year-old first-time mom got the shock of a lifetime when her daughter started screaming inexplicably after she put her in the bath this past December.
They were purple and red, she tells PEOPLE, adding, “it looked like she’d been in a fire.”
Kaylah Merritt.Brogan Thomas/Facebook
The mother immediately rushed her to the local emergency room, where doctors told her that Kaylah was suffering from herpes, likely because someone with a cold sore on his or her mouth had kissed the infant on the lips. Thomas doesn’t know when the kiss happened or who it was from.
The doctors added that because babies’ immune systems aren’t strong enough to fight off the virus, Kaylah could’ve died if her condition had gone untreated much longer, Thomas recalls.
A month has passed since Thomas first discovered the symptoms, and Kaylah is “still very uncomfortable, not sleeping as well as she normally does and really clingy to both me and her dad,” the mother says. She adds that the purple and red marks are still visible, and it’s unclear when they will go away entirely because Kaylah will have herpes for the rest of her life.
Thomas tells PEOPLE that her daughter’s condition has been incredibly “stressful” for her, causing her to be put on antidepressants. But, she adds, “as long she’s okay, I’m okay.”
“So I’ve just seen a post about how parents go over the top about people kissing the child on the lips and that it’s perfectly fine? Well I can tell you now that’s not the case,” Thomas wrote. “We [were] very lucky we caught it when we did!”
For anyone who regularly spends time with infants and toddlers, Thomas says to never “kiss a child on the lips. Even if you don’t have a cold sore you can still be a carrier without any symptoms.”
source: people.com
