Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease

Kayrin caught HFMD over the long Deepavali weekend and what agony it was for the little girl. My heart breaks. Ulcers lined the inner sides of her cheeks, dotted her tongue and were on her upper and lower lips. She cried out in pain everytime water came in contact with her.
It all started with Kayrin telling me over the phone, as I was driving home, that she was feeling sick. She threw up as soon as I arrived home at about 8 p.m. We brought her to a pediatrician's clinic (not her regular one), and she threw up twice more at the clinic. Suspecting it was stomach flu, the doc noted that she has lots of ulcers in her mouth plus quite a high temperature of about 39 Celsius. But with no spots on her hands or feet, he said it wasn't HFMD.
On Saturday, when showering her, I cleaned her tongue. Kayrin screamed in pain. That was really awful. Her fever seems to have abated that day. But by Sunday morning, she was in such agony that we brought her into the A&E at Sunway Hospital. The doc gave OralAid, a lignocaine mouth drip, paracetamol and told us to give her warm salt gargle. Wrong thing when her ulcers were so huge. Poor Kayrin didn't want anymore of the rise after I forced it on her twice. By Sunday evening, she had refused all food and drink. Her grandmother made her way home to feed Kayrin. That night, reading on the Web about HFMD, I realized that dehydration was the biggest enemy.
To feed Kayrin water, which she refused to even sip, we used a plastic syringe and `pumped' water into her mouth throughout the night. Deepavali (a Monday) was spent at home, catching up on sleep. By then, Kayrin was scratching her toes a second night.
Come Tuesday morning, I drove Kayrin to her usual pediatrician, Dr. Wong May Foong, who immediately diagnosed Kayrin as having HFMD and pointed out the spots/vesicles on her fingers and toes.
At the clinic was also Kayrin's classmate, Law Yen Kay, who also complained of pain in the mouth. The two of them were among the three who have caught HFMD in the class of Sakura B at Tadika Prima Ceria.
I've gone really paranoid as a result of Kayrin catching HFMD. I asked Ida the maid to wipe all doorknobs with soap, constantly clean the fridge handle, especially after Shaw Feng showed me an article on dirty hands and door handles.
Yesterday, Wednesday, Kayrin started asking for food again. A good sign. And she was ordering me to scold her daddy for being a bad guy. I shouldn't have married a bad guy, she said.