Alex Gets His Medicine
Tina's Blog February 16th, 2007
This is now what we do 3 times a day. We have discovered it works best (in the daytime hours) to have him in the high chair so he's contained and can't crawl away from the IV pole.
The box in the back is the box all our supplies came in–for just this week. (And the antibiotics get to stay in the fridge.) We have our own IV pole now–if anyone ever needs one, now you know who you can borrow it from. ;-)
We usually start by getting out all the supplies (here's a picture of all we get to use). We start with our first "flush", then the antibiotics (in the bag, dripping via the IV)–that usually takes 10-15 minutes to go in. Then we "flush" again (using a tube of Sodium Cloride/water solution) and then instert a tube of Heparin to keep things from clotting up in the tube. All these easily "click" into the IV tube they put in him at the hospital…no needles, nothing hard involved. The hardest part is keeping him from tugging on the tubing or crawling away. The other hard part is administering this at 10 pm. We have to do it 3 times a day, 8 hours apart (give or take an hour). He's woken up the last two nights. I'm a bit concerned he's going to develop a habit of waking up at 10 from this–oh wait, he already HAD that habit, and we had to break it by making him cry it out.
The one good thing from all this, he now is sleeping in his crib, not the pack 'n play in the office/guest room. We had moved him there for the crying it out process and he got rather attached to it and wouldn't sleep in the crib. Now he has no problem sleeping in the crib.