I have been meaning to share this. When you parent Asian children, you learn a lot about small and different medical issues that you might not share.

For instance, my oldest son has Exfoliative keratolysis. You can goggle it if you want but basically it means the skin on his hands and, to a lesser extent, his feet is always peeling. It doesn’t bother him or itch. It just looks weird. It comes and it goes, but mostly it’s there.

His skin is also prone to cracking and splitting - particularity his feet. He often has to bandage parts of his feet in the summer to keep from getting infected.

Probably no coincidence but he also suffered bad eczema when he was younger. He would have such bad patches on his inner elbows and knees that they would bleed. We would bandage them but he was allergic, also, to the adhesive in the bandages so he’d get a raised rash around the eczema from the bandages. It was pretty horrible. Thankfully he’s mostly grown out of that. He still occasionally has patches of eczema behind his knees but they don’t bother him much.

My ex says Vnese are prone to VERY dry skin. This is the biggest challenge for me in raising a multi-cultural child because I have really easy low-maintenance skin. I have literally never used moisturizer in my life. My oldest son needs it probably many times a day. Now that he’s older I try to remind him to do this for himself but he frequently has noticeably dry skin on his legs and arms and even face.

My middle son did not get Vnese skin. However he DID get the typical Mongolian spots and, with those, Scleral melanocytosis. This is basically a Mongolian spot “of the eye” - the white of the eye. You can really only see it when my son looks to the side. I secretly worried for years that he had cancer or something seriously wrong with him. Finally I asked and was told that it is an “Asian Thing”. Almost half of all 6 year olds have scleral melanocytosis. I don’t think he had it at birth but developed it sometime over the first year or two of life. Our Vn friends have told us that this is considered to be a “sign of luck” in Vn. So now he feels really special

I also have this pretty interesting article bookmarked called “Health Problems in Chinese Children are Different” because I found that many of the issues are the same in the Vn population.

So now you know!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 8th, 2006 at 2:04 pm and is filed under Adoption, Parenting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.