September 23rd, 2005 by Jemaleddin Cole
Jared got sick last week, and his doctor prescribed him some antibiotics. We knew from experience how hard it is to get him to drink the amoxicillin liquid, so we ended up trying some alka-seltzer style dissolving tablets (which he wouldn’t drink) and some chewables (that he wouldn’t chew).
The worst part was that Jared’s throat was all swollen up so that he had a hard time swallowing anything, and his taste buds were off-kilter from being sick. We ended up chopping up the chewables into little pieces, powdering them with the back of a spoon, loading them into an oral syringe, filling that with berry juice (not punch! Heaven forbid it be punch!), and flicking the syringe with our knuckles until it all mixed together. Needless to say, I felt like I was running some kind of drug den. “Close the curtains honey, I don’t want the neighbors to see!”
Once we got the pills mixed into an acceptably normal tasting liquid (”But I want the sour one!”), we had to pin Jared down on the floor and half-force/half-convince him to swallow it. Which is exactly as much fun as it sounds. The problem is that his legs are so strong that he can knock his mother off of him if she tries to pin him, but his neck is so strong that I have to be the one to hold his head still.
He’s pretty much better now, but we still have to give him the medicine every 8 hours for another few days. He takes the medicine pretty well, though we sometimes have to pretend that we’re having a tea party (that’s my boy).
What we’re worried about is that he’s getting stronger every day, and we aren’t. At some point, he’s going to have to learn to swallow this stuff on his own, or I’ll be showing up to work with a black eye every time he gets sick.