Friday, September 26, 2008

Is anything safe?

At M's first set of shots, they gave me a small bottle of Tylenol and said to make it easier on her to give it to her before her shots. I knew I was planning on doing this at home, so I did it.

Over the course of the next nearly 18 months, she's gotten that stuff more times that I can count. Especially with all of the ear infections (I think we had like 6 in 8 months), reactions to shots (she didn't react well), and just the general issues with being a kid in daycare. The endless number of bottles of grape flavored goo we've gone through...

When she was old enough for it, we did switch to ibuprofen, but she still got acetaminophen at times. After all, we were told that if she got a high fever, to keep it down. If she was teething, give her something. While I'm not a fan of over medicating, I also know that manging pain is one of those things that is also important.

So when this little gem hit my email, I kind of freaked. A has allergy induced asthma, my brother has asthma, and I most likely have a touch of it too. Oh yeah, and at our last check of her ears because of extra snot/eye crud, our Dr. brought up that she thought she had allergies. We started her on Claritin because its been a heck of a fall for those, and she was not sleeping much at all. Has our choices about daycare/managing her pain meant that she'll deal with the issues her dad and I do? Why hasn't this been studied before? It isn't like that stuff hasn't been around for years.

We've stopped use the use of it for now. Ibuprofen seems to be better on her fevers anyway, and it last longer, so if given at night, we get more sleep overall. I'm sure we'll find out it made her extra bitchy as a teenager when she's 16 or something, but I still can't stand to see my baby in pain.

2 comments:

Rebecca said...

Everything in the world is bad for you, right? It sure seems that way. Sigh.

Christina said...

I hadn't seen that yet. We've always switched to ibuprofen as soon as they hit four months old, mostly because I feel like Tylenol is worthless. It never works for me as a pain killer, so I figure it probably won't work for my kids, either.

Of course, I'm sure someday they'll find that ibuprofen and gas drops cause some other horrible condition down the road, and I'll be screwed, too.