Girl Got Amoxy

So the baby was slammed with her first double ear infection. Poor old thing. Thankfully, her doc was at the ready with a handy script for Amoxicilin.

All that remained was to administer the stuff to the baby. Doesn't sound so terribly difficult, but it is. Oh, how it is.

We got one of those syringes that shoot the meds right into the baby's mouth. Surely, I thought, with this handy device, there'd be no fuss, no mess. I mean, you shoot it right in their gullet.

Of course, they retain the ability to shoot it right out. At first, Terza would just bat it away with her hands or jerk her head away, so we got smart and ruthless and would hold her hands and her head so there was no way she could escape the medicine. That's when she realized she had mounted the in-mouth resistance. Because there was nothing we can do to prevent her from gurgling and she she gurgles, the meds csme spraying out -- all over our faces.

Then we were left wondering how much she had actually swallowed and was it enough to make the dose effective. I mean, we didn't want to overdose with her extra meds but from the look of the pink goo splashed all over our shirts and faces, she definitely hadn't ingested much of it.

So I called the pharmacist.

"How much of the antibiotics does the baby need to swallow to make the dose effective?" I asked.

It did seem like a dumb question to me as I was asking it but its kind of a dumb situation and I was certain he'd fielded an inquiry like this before. From the sound of his voice, he had not.

"Ummm, the whole thing," he said, "A dose is a dose."

"Yeah, but she just keeps spitting so much out," I protested, "I don't know what to do."

"Just give her some water afterwards to wash the taste away," he suggested.

You should keep your day job, I wanted to tell him,  Because you are piss poor at baby advice. I mean, have you ever actually tried to get 4 mls of Moxy in a baby's guts? The water chaser is not going to get this job done.

The more times we gave her the meds, the better able she became at resisting through her Super-Gurgling Technique of civil disobedience.

"But why? why? WHY?" I asked her, "Don't you know this is GOOD for you? Don't you know this will make the pain go AWAY?"

She looked at me like, "What the fuck, man? You know I'm just a baby."