DENGUE!

Dengue is not cool! I'm not a fan of mosquitoes. The past couple of weeks we have been fighting dengue. If you want to read about dengue then click HERE. (That is a picture of the Aedes Mosquito - the one that carries Dengue). Aashini's school called us last Monday and told us she was feeling bad and we should come get her. We went to school and one of the classroom helpers was standing in the lobby holding her - she looked pitiful!!! We took her home and held her while she watched some cartoons. Her fever got REALLY high. At one point it jumped up to 106 and we quickly took her to the shower and showered her off and gave her a Popsicle. She got down to 104. (The next couple of days she stayed at 103 and 104 - WITH Tylenol - it was quite scary.) We took her to the doctor that night and he said he thought she had Dengue, so we got some bloodwork done to check for Dengue and to check for some other things. The bloodwork confirmed Dengue. Since Dengue is a virus, there isn't much you can do as far as medicine and things like that BUT you have to keep an eye on the platelet count. There aren't many things you can do to raise platelet counts, BUT vitamin C and Papaya leaves can do the trick! She was eating Pomegranate seeds and drinking juice (that's all she would eat or drink), but her platelets were dropping (slowly, not enough to hospitalize or anything), so we tried the Papaya Leaf Trick. Here are some papaya leaves (below)... To tell you the journey we went on to find those is a whole different story for another day....

So, there's a trick that people in South Asia and Southeast Asia have been doing for years. They get the leaf of the Papaya tree and take off the stems. Then, you pound the leaves (see below).

It's quite exhausting! After you pound the leaves, you squeeze out the juice into a cup. It's super dark juice and it's the bitterest, nastiest thing I've ever tasted!

We gave Aashini some as "medicine" and she HATED IT!! Later I tried mixing it into a smoothie. The smoothie tasted OK, but the after taste was HORRIBLE! She didn't have all of the leaf juice, but she had some of it :)

She's doing soooo much better now! She went to school for the first time yesterday and did good :) She's going to be a little extra tired and achy for the next couple of weeks, but she's doing good and all smiles :)