Scabies are mites that crawl over your body, find a crease in your skin and burrow into you. They will lay eggs, die, then the eggs will hatch in 3 -4 days, and all the little baby mites will crawl over your body, find other creases and burrow into your skin repeating the cycle exponentially. Gross? Yeah. Itchy.
Molly was covered in the bites. The bites can also infect, causing the lesions that were oozing pus and blood when I first met her. Most of the children at the orphanage have bites and lesions on their bodies.
The first line of defence we use is a pharmaceutical called Nix. It's a topical cream we can get in Canada, but not in Vietnam. You cover yourself and your baby with it - head to toe - leave it on overnight, and it suffocates the mites in the burrows stopping the cycle.
I tried to use Nix on Molly the first day I had her is Saigon. She started screaming and writhing and pulling at her skin. I couldn't put her through any more discomfort, so I washed it off of her. The doctor told me later that some children occasionally have a bad reaction to it.
However, I had bathed Molly at the orphanage a few days earlier with a homeopathic solution my naturopathic doctor had given me. When I took Molly in for her follow up appointment, the doctor agreed that the homeopathic solution had been effective. The only new bites she had gotten were on her face - the only place I didn't treat.
When I had to take Molly back to the orphanage, I continued to bathe her in the solution every day or two. I can see that it is doing the job, but it isn't a repellant. Molly is still getting bitten everyday, and I am crying every day at the mess of bites all over her defenceless little body. Then I scratch at my own bites and cry some more. After 6 weeks, I'm starting to run low on the Soverlome treatment, so will have to arrange for someone from home to bring me more.
The best solution is to get both of us out of the orphanage every day! Send good wishes that it happens soon.
