I am in charge of doling out medicine. Medicine and feeding the dog. No matter what and from the beginning of our small charges' lives. Otherwise we may both feed the dog and create a giant rolly-polly Shetland Chi-cocker. Or conversely each of us will think the other is going to feed her and she will starve to well below her 12 pound weight.
Friday night we had a breech of contract. Lily and Michael are quite miserable with a cold. Sorry to Mikey, because he is under 4 and therefore cannot take cold medicine. Suffer in silence, kiddo. But Lily is now 4, so she is allowed a carefully measured teaspoon of the stuff. Which we only give at night to help her sleep. And I know that there have been recalls because it is so easy to overdose your kid on this stuff. Just as the kids settled down to watch their pre-bed tv show, I gave Lily her decongestant and made sure she drank up every last drop.
Fast forward 30 minutes. Jeff put Lily to bed and I put Michael to bed as per usual. I was checking e-mails, etc., and Jeff passed through the computer room on his way to watch basketball with Andrew. "Oh, by the way, I gave Lily some decongestant before bed...she just seemed miserable."
"Nononononononononono! I give the medicine!" I believe was my mature and well reasoned reply.
We paged the on-call doctor, who promptly called us back and reassured us that a mere double dose will not cause respiratory distress, etc. Especially in a child with no history of lung issues, etc. But she did say, "However, this type of medicine can cause restlessness...so you may be up partying with Lily all night."
How true.
Except it wasn't a party as much as Lily waking up every hour sweating and screaming and delirious. She had no fever. She was just unable to stay asleep. She finally passed out for good at 11:30...about 4 hours after her double dose of medicine. The good news is, she woke up at 5:30 as per usual and refused to nap. So Saturday was lots of fun... And Michael was up coughing, and Andrew woke me up as he was sleep walking. WTH happened to resting up on the weekends?
We are really batting zero around here. Except for the broccoli thing. Does getting your kids to eat green vegetables balance out overdosing and feeding small choking/nostril sized objects? Yah, I didn't think so.
6 comments:
Oh Giselle - glad Lily is okay!
Our poor dog is a victim of poor planning both ways - having one of you in charge of it is genius.
Yikes. Glad she is okay! If it makes you feel better, we have done that with Ally's allergy meds before as well. I felt like a horrible mom calling the poison control line, but thankfully, they weren't that worried at all. What a rough night you had! I hope they are feeling better--and that you get some rest!
I had no idea too much medicine could effect kids that way! I have to admit, I give Zander cold medicine when he's sick. I just cut the dosage in half. Makes the road to recovery a little less painful. But I would never admit that to my doctor :) Hope everyone is better soon!
Glad that Lily is okay- and at least she wasn't up half the night, right? This could happen to any of us & you guys handled it perfectly. Hope everyone is feeling better soon :)
At least the mix up was not that you gave her the dog's medicine. I know people who have done that.
Hope everyone is feeling better soon.
Good times....
That's why you keep a blog, so one day your kids will know your good intentions and efforts mostly outweigh these type of events.
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