I feel like I keep making discoveries about myself lately. Maybe I've become slightly more introspective, or maybe things are happening that are causing this. I don't know, but either way it's been interesting.


The situation:
Well, LB seems to have had, and gotten over a case of roseola (a minor viral illness that causes fever and a subsequent rash). I don't know exactly when or where he picked it up since it incubates for between 5 and 15 days before any signs of it appear. It's a virus that's mostly harmless, causes a high fever for 3 days or so and then a non-itchy rash that lasts from 1 hour to 1 week. His rash lasted only about 1.5 days or so.

And the fall out from this. Being that it's summer break for me, LB has been visiting and catching up with many of his friends in the area, so when he came down with this, he exposed many of his friends to it, heck, maybe he even got it from one of them, who knows!!

Anyway, back to what I've learned about me. Once I became aware of the illness and LB saw the Dr. I let some of the mom's of his friends know at a toddler group at the hospital. One of the parents who showed up this week at the hospital is pregnant with twins and roseola is sometimes bad news for pregnant women. Well, she promptly left, which made me feel bad, especially since she doesn't get out much with her other little one due to pregnancy complications. Later that evening, one of the other mom's posted info about roseola to the moms that she knew LB and her son had been in contact with. This whole situation weighed heavily on me that evening, I had trouble getting to sleep last night and everything-very unusual for me. I didn't really think I'd done anything wrong with the whole situation, except perhaps that I did not put out the APB on roseola-the other mom did. (I have subsequently contacted the parents of kids & pregnant women with whom LB was in contact to let them know about the possible exposure.)

Then today it dawned on me, my worry was based on how I thought other people perceived me due to this "incident." I'm not one who worries about appearances and how I'm dressed, or wearing make-up, and that type of stuff, but apparently I'm quite upset at the thought that people might think I'm stupid, or have done something stupid. So, my image is caught up in smarts and not physical image, no big shock there, but still I was pretty surprised at how strongly it affected me.

I have some other observations about this whole thing, but those will go separately.