Yesterday was a tough day. It’s been over a year since we have experienced the kind of baby-dread emotional lock-down that Adam has been producing in the grip of this virus. Last evening he redefined the idea of the buckwheat baby. This is what I was talking about in the most recent monthly report when I told Adam about how miserable he can be. Granted, none of us are at our best when ill, but this recent behavior perfectly illustrates how mulishly contrary, irrational, wilfull and difficult Adam can be, and usually is, anytime he’s faced with a situation that is less than ideal.
Magda’s been charting his temperature since early Wednesday morning and it’s been all up and down, but at no point has it not been in the fever range. The pediatrician said that he likely has a sore throat as well. Ambient temps are back up to 30°. Ever since Adam woke up today, if he can be said to ever have truly slept amidst all of last night’s moist, hot thrashing, he’s been producing a sound somewhere between whining and crying. When I get home from work Magda looks nearly as wet, miserable, and bedraggled as the feverish baby.
“He won’t drink,” she tells me plaintively. “Juice, water, tea, milk, nothing. He refuses. The doctor said he has to get at least 500 milliliters of liquid a day.” She’s right. Nothing works. Every attempt to get him to take in any liquid at all, from any sort of drinking vessel, is futile, met with vehement headshaking, violent thrusting-away of the offered cup, and HYSTERICAL SCREAMING. We try the sippy-cup, nippled bottle, big-boy cup, grownup glass. Nothing. “He won’t drink,” Magda says again, this time a little frantically.
Voluntarily.
What follows is like something out of Guantánamo. We wrestle him down and pin his clawing hands, brace his head like Alex watching ultraviolence, and procede to force water down his throat 40 drops at a time with a syringe the size of a pinkie-length pencil. His resistance of course redoubles in the face of the parental cliché of “we’re doing this for your own good.” And we are, of course — we’re trying to keep him out of the hospital. Despite my overly optimistic ‘on the mend’ stuff posted yesterday, his doctor is concerned and Adam’s just 500 ml away from a hospital stay. As the hot, slippery thrashing continues we try to picture him with an IV in and wonder and that would work exactly how?
Now, the drop comes in a variety of forms: metric, medical, imperial, gill-conversion, and (of course) U.S. I am not sure which unit we’re using here. 1 metric drop = 1/20th of a milliliter; medical, 1/12. You do the math to work out how long it takes two reasonably robust adults to get a few hundred ml into him, screaming, thrashing all the way, at 40 drops a squirt.
We keep stopping to offer him the soft option. “Sippy-cup? Nipple? No?” SCREAMS. “Okay, then, hold still…”
Look. It’s 30 degrees in here. Your throat is sore, you’ve got a fever, you’re sweating out a lot of fluid. Do you want a little drink of water? Not on your life. Not if you’re Adam.
I say again, I know that illness does not bring out the best of any of us. A fever can make us miserable enough to magnify our foibles. And this fever is overwhelmingly emphasizing the fact that what we have here is a buckwheat baby.
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July 14th, 2006 at 14.18 CEST+2.00
Oh dear.
July 14th, 2006 at 22.26 CEST+2.00
I’m sure you’ve tried this, so please excuse my addition. This seemed to work for both of our little ones when they threatened to Chernobyl on us.
Fill the tub with lukewarm water.
Have you or your lovely spouse jump in.
Have lots of water bottles of various delivery systems close by.
Gently lay Adam in, between your legs.
After some splashing about, try offering him a water bottle.
Hope this helps. I swear, it did work for us on many an occassion. We thought it had to do with water being on his body and water activity all about.
July 15th, 2006 at 06.54 CEST+2.00
When I was in the hospital after giving birth to So, and the little bugger would absolutely NOT breastfeed–not for anything–the doctor told me that I was going to have to start giving him formula because he was in danger of starving and was already severely dehydrated and losing a scary amount of weight. But the nurses were so adamant that if I kept trying, eventually he would get the hang of breastfeeding, so they instructed me that I needed to feed him his formula from a syringe, drop by fucking drop. This was supposed to keep him from getting the much-hyped “nipple confusion” or something and allow him to get the hang of breastfeeding while, hopefully, not starving to death. Well, it takes a long time to feed a baby with a syringe, as you now know. It takes yet longer when that baby is desperately starving, just like it is harder to get Adam to drink now that he is, I’m sure, feeling more than a little desperate himself. And I sympathize with Magda. I was, of course, in a great deal of pain and severely sleep-deprived, alone, and trying (with no small desperation) to keep my baby alive, drop by fucking drop. It’s a nightmare.
(Obviously, once I got away from the “breastfeeding consultant”, aka Nurse Stalin, at the hospital, I gave him a great big bottle with a great big rubber nipple, and things were fine.)
I’m sorry to hear about this. Give Magda a huge hug for me. I hope you are all well soon.