“I just want (Manitobans) to know that it can be very serious for other people, even if your experience is not very serious. Even if you think your child is fine after just three or four days, it is very important for you to stay home because your child is still contagious. Someone else could have a really negative effect,” says Erica Bulow. When she picked up her four-year-old daughter from a daycare in Island Lakes on June 30, Bulow was told another child had attended daycare for three days while contracting hand, foot and mouth disease. Symptoms of the viral illness may take three days to a week to appear. They include a fever, rash and blisters — which Bulow saw firsthand when her daughter started getting itchy red spots on July 2. Despite careful disinfection and distancing within their household, Bulow and her 10-month-old son also became infected and began showing more severe symptoms. Her son had a high fever, and Bulow consulted a pediatrician to care for both of her children, not expecting to become seriously ill herself. By July 4, her symptoms had progressed to numbness in her face, fingers, hands and feet. She had difficulty breathing and the blisters on her feet were so painful that she could not walk. Her husband called an ambulance, and Bulow spent more than seven hours waiting to see the lone ER doctor at St. Boniface. For more than five hours, he lay on a stretcher in the hallway connected to an oxygen tank while at least nine other patients waited in the hallway and a “continuous stream” of paramedics lined up to offload patients to ambulances. “At that point, the oxygen tank was gone, but I could feel my fingers and toes and my jaw again. The doctor said ‘well, we don’t really know what it is, it’s probably just a side effect of hand, foot and mouth, it could be meningitis,’” Bulow said. The disease can cause brain swelling and meningitis, but Bulow said the doctor was clearly very busy and dismissive as a result. “There wasn’t much concern in the hospital about it. They said, “Oh, hand, foot, mouth is a little disease, it’s more of a nuisance than anything else.” The Free Press Newsletter
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Get breaking stories of the day, weather forecast and more delivered straight to your inbox every morning of the week. Sign up for Head Start The next day, she and her infant son visited a clinic doctor who confirmed that they had severe infections from the disease. Bulow was prescribed antibiotics out of concern that the virus had given way to a bacterial infection. She and her family are now on the mend, but Bulow wanted to share her experience to help others. She said she was told all the children at the daycare were infected, as well as all their siblings. The outbreak has affected many families. Bulow is calling for clear public health communication about hand, foot and mouth disease, including specific quarantine guidance and more information about how likely people are to get sick if they’ve previously been infected with COVID-19. Her family contracted COVID-19 in April, which also came from contamination at her daughter’s daycare. The Winnipeg Regional Health Authority did not respond to a request for comment on the prevalence of foot-and-mouth disease in Winnipeg this summer. [email protected]
