Mom ‘Shocked’ By What Caused Her Infant Son’s ‘Melting’ Skin [Photos]

A mom was shocked to learn the cause behind her son’s “melting” skin, which 35 doctors had misdiagnosed as eczema.

The problem started early in Isaiah Smith’s life when he was just 3-months-old. Mom Stephanie Smith from Atlanta, Georgia, was desperate to find a solution.

Initially, a rash developed due to a cut on the infant’s cheek, but it quickly grew out of control. Soon it was red and raw and reacted severely to perfumes and clothes that had been subjected to fabric softener.

Smith said that the doctor had given her son a steroid cream to help get rid of the rash. This initially worked, but it would quickly get out of control.

She explains further in comments reported by the Mirror that relief was temporary.

“His skin cleared up but a week later it came back, so we applied more [topical steroid]. This went on in a cycle over two months. Then his hair started to fall out. He became sick and lethargic. But all the doctors I took him to just said it was eczema. They told me to stop breastfeeding him as the milk protein could make it worse.”

His skin eventually became “red, raw, and burning,” so much that he had to be taken to doctors for a direct injection of liquid steroids, which cleared up the skin for a while, but it would be back with a vengeance less than 48 hours later.

The mom was shocked by just how horrible Isaiah’s life had become. She admits that even holding him would bring indescribable pain for the little one and that every time her skin touched his, “it would blister and ooze like crazy.”

She continued, “I couldn’t even touch my cheek to his. We couldn’t use towels, because they were too rough on his skin. Instead we used thin cotton sheets. He was most comfortable in his bathtub, the water pouring over him in the sink. But he was still in pain. He would wail, and I would cry along.”

The Isaiah Quinn blog has some disturbing images to go along with the description, like this one of the little guy wrapped in gauze, and, of course, the one featured at the top of this article.

Eventually, Stephanie Smith would pursue her own research into what could be troubling her young son, and what she found were similar cases online of reactions to topical steroid withdrawal — kids just like her own suffering the same excruciating pain.

She immediately stopped using the steroids on him altogether, and through continued research, came up with her own home remedy: a lemongrass-zinc blend applied underneath the gauze.

“As time went on we saw patches of clear skin,” she said. “Isaiah would walk to the kitchen island, where I kept the balm, point at the jar and point to his face. It clearly soothed him. I took about 50 photos a day to see the progress, because it could change moment to moment.”

Today, Isaiah is “like any other toddler,” but it didn’t come without a price. Stephanie says that she pretty much lost the first year of Isaiah’s life because showing him physical affection would cause such pain.

“I wasn’t able to kiss him or hold him. Now we squeeze him all the time,” she said. “He is a squeezable little guy.”

This is, unfortunately, not the first time that a failure to properly diagnose caused significant damage to a child. Take this previous Inquisitr story in which a child’s head “almost fell off,” according to his parents due to a reaction that his body was producing with a lithium-ion battery that he had swallowed. Apparently, the toxic reaction was slowly dissolving his spine.

Fortunately, the battery was removed before it became fatal, but the child will have effects from the incident the rest of his life and cannot reportedly hold up his own head from a laying position.

[Images via Isaiah Quinn blog, linked above]