Well, we’ve had all kinds of problems with his mother. We took the kids for all but 10 days over the last 5 months to let her “get her life together”. But every time he comes back from a day or two with her, it’s something else and it’s gettig ridiculous. This might be something and silly as him bumping into a candle and having wax burn him or him jumping up on her while she was having a cigarette.
I’m not looking to get her in trouble or involve authorities, I just want to know what it is and I wasn’t getting any answers from her, so I turned to you folks, hoping that someone who has seen similar could tell me it’s no big deal, keep it clean and it’ll heal fine - which is I’m sure the answer. But what caused it and should it have been prevented and how can it be prevented in the future. That’s my purpose here.
My thought would be that you might take him to a doctor and just ask, "Does this look like poison ivy? My son is autistic and can't tell me exactly what happened here."
The problem here is that if it's something to be concerned about, then you want to know. If it's nothing, you risk stirring up a bunch of unnecessary trouble. I don't really know of anyone who can really tell you whether it's something to be concerned about, except a medical professional. I don't know what the reporting-to-authorities requirements of medical professionals or, or what the potential consequences of just going to see a doctor might be. I suppose if you personally know a doctor or a nurse, you could ask them.
It does look like poison ivy, especially the small blisters. Go to the store and get some calamine lotion to put on it. And he needs a bath to get rid of the poison ivy oil to keep him from rubbing the oil onto new areas.
If you get it near the eyes, a doc will give you steroids.
We once mentioned to our pediatrician that we were sort of embarrassed about the number of bruises our kids had. And the doc said he would be more concerned if the kids didn’t have some bruises. And they weren’t autistic, they were normal kids.
Poison ivy is very hard to prevent. In fact, if some idiot burns poison ivy a mile down the road, you can catch it from the air.