You would think by the time you hit kid #4, you’d have it all figured out–at least, all the baby stuff. Right? Or…not.
This is a story about Tylenol. Or, since we’re a generic type family, acetaminophen.
Michael had his 2-month well baby visit on Monday. You know what that means–shots. Michael’s face went beet-red–I mean, beet–with two little yellow dots in the middle where his eyebrows came together. But then he was fine. The nurse wrote down dosages for the various formulations of acetaminophen and sent us on our way.
About bedtime, Michael became inconsolable. It seemed like any way we touched him caused him agony. We’ve never had an immunization reaction, at least not like this, so I ran upstairs and gave him a dropperful of acetaminophen without looking at the nurse’s notes. After all, it’s either one dropperful or two, .8 or 1.6, and I knew I needed the smallest dose. As the night progressed, he refused to wake up. At the 4 1/2 hour mark, feeling my own well-being reaching the danger zone, I went and got him up, but he refused to nurse. Flat-out refused. After fifteen minutes and a second dose of medicine, I managed to get five swallows of milk down his throat. I put him back to bed and went downstairs to pump. On the way, I tripped on a shoe left on the stairs and slid the rest of the way down. Temper tantrum. Bad mood. Resentment skyrocketing. Can’t sleep…though everyone else in the house is like the dead, even the one that shouldn’t be.
As I wandered around the middle floor, I decided to get out the sheets on immunizations, you know, the ones they hand you every time but you never, ever read. I figured I’d look at the reactions and see if extreme sleepiness and lack of appetite was par for the course. And I saw the handwritten dosage note: .4 mL.
My insides turned to a hard rock. I’d just given him .8. Twice. I thought a whole lot of words not fit for the public and turned on the computer to look up acetaminophen overdose, and by the time I finished reading I wanted to throw up. All reason told me that .8 mL is a miniscule dose and they build in huge margins of error…but the fact remained that his symptoms were right there on the computer screen.
I called poison control at 2:45 a.m., and a lovely woman named Janelle talked me down from the ledge. In the morning, Michael sort of ate, and began coughing, and it was soon clear that he was not overdosed, he had simply, and finally, succumbed to a full-blown virus.
But I didn’t give him any more medicine.
Fast forward to last night. At 1a.m., he woke up screaming. Not crying–screaming. He wouldn’t nurse, he wouldn’t let me put him down so I could go pump–he was absolutely inconsolable, and he kept rolling up in a ball like his tummy hurt. I managed to get him to sleep on my chest for a little while, but by 2:30 a.m. I was out of tricks, and I pulled out the acetaminophen again, this time turning up the light to make sure I got the correct dosage. And I discovered something that made the bottom drop out of my stomach again.
The dropper is not .8. It’s more like 1 or 1.2. And I gave him a full dropperful. Which means what I told Janelle on the phone last night about his dosage is wrong. And the web site said the symptoms of overdose usually show up 12 hours or more later, and abdominal pain is a big one on the list.
I cannot call poison control two nights in a row. I just can’t.
What if my baby IS overdosed, and I DON’T call, just because I feel stupid?
I thought about what I’d read: liver damage, brain damage. I can’t imagine having another child with special needs, not when it was my fault.
I called.
Janelle answered the phone again, thank God, and after about three exchanges she remembered me from the night before. She talked me down off the ledge again (because let’s face it, at this point I was on the way to a second night running of less than four hours’ sleep, on the heels of a week or more with less than five. Let’s be frank, I was not in a good emotional place). “Let me do the math for you,” she said kindly. “How much does he weigh?” Calculation, dosage, division. “It’s probably a one-mil dropper, and he could have ten of those before he overdosed.”
Thank God…crisis averted.
I laid down with Michael on my chest again, in flagrant violation of everything anyone’s ever told you about baby safety, and I listened to his horribly stuffy nose…and didn’t get back to sleep for an hour. But at least I knew I didn’t poison my baby. And I am properly humbled. It’s clear to me that I will never, never have this whole parenthood thing figured out. Even the part I’ve done four times.
