No match for a two-year-old

September 28, 2006 - 9:25 PM by Sarah

augmentin
David Bogner’s son, Yonah, seems like a very sweet child with a very strong will.

First up is the latest saga concerning our youngest son, Yonah. He hasn’t been sleeping well for the past week, and he woke up a few mornings ago with one side of his neck swollen. No fever…no obvious tenderness (hard to tell since when he’s in a bad mood, he doesn’t tolerate poking and prodding anywhere), just a big goose-egg on his neck which looked suspiciously like a goiter.

So Zahava took Yonah to the pediatrician for a look-see.

Our pediatrician happens to be an extremely personable man with a fantastic bedside manner with the kids. Being able to actually get near the kids and gain their confidence is most of the battle, in my opinion as a parent and layman. That he also happens to be a very competent physician and a respected diagnostician is just gravy.

Now it is a rare kid indeed who looks forward to seeing the doctor… and in this respect Yonah has a normal, healthy loathing of the medical community in general and the pediatrician in particular. The moment he caught a whiff of that waiting room smell he basically tried to climb back into Zahava’s uterus. Not having one of those I can only speculate that this probably isn’t a pleasant sensation.

He didn’t have a fever and his throat looked basically OK, so the doctor decided that blood tests were in order.

How many people would you guess are required to restrain a 2-and-a-half year old for a blood draw. Two? Three? Keep going…

Let’s just say that there were more hands on that kid than there were square inches of exposed skin. I’m told that the screams could be heard in neighboring communities.

However, just to show that there were no hard feelings, once the procedure was completed, Yonah walked calmly to the door… turned around to make eye contact with the doctor… and with a small sniffle said “Thank you much“.

It would be a heartwarming anecdote if the story ended there. But the next day when the blood-work came back, it showed his white count through the roof. There was an infection there somewhere so the doc wrote out a scrip for antibiotics.

For non-Israelis reading this, I have to pause here to share a couple of things that may surprise you. First of all, you need a prescription to buy something as simple as an aspirin in Israel. Seriously. Anyone can walk in off the street here and buy codeine over the counter… but if you want to take two aspirin and call someone in the morning? Better have a prescription.

Likewise, Israeli docs don’t push antibiotics the way many American physicians do. So fearful is the Israeli medical community of creating drug-resistant strains that you can’t get antibiotic ointments (like Neosporin) here. In fact you can’t even buy antibacterial soap!

Anyway, back to the story. Yonah… antibiotics… a fairly big deal. But we had no idea how big a deal. You see, while most kids on the planet looooove the taste of bubblegum flavored Augmentin… Yonah, um, not so much.

Just for the record, getting fluids (such as blood) out of a struggling little boy is child’s play compared to trying to get something into him. This is because in addition to his ability to thrash, squirm and actually turn himself into a liquid, one also has to contend with his well-developed ability to spit.

When I got home from work on the day of his first dose I immediately noted that Zahava had a shiny, sticky sheen about her… and that she smelled vaguely of bubblegum. Apparently the tag-team efforts of the pharmacist and Zahava were not equal to Yonah’s ability to forcefully expectorate a fair amount of the first dose. Since then we’ve been able to get subsequent doses into him in no small part because of the experience I gained on my high school wrestling team. [For those of you out there who wrestled in high school or college, I have two words which will make everything clear: 'Banana Split'.]