Infant drops rarely make that extra effort to make make administration easier
This is a new experience in life. Using a dropper to give medicine. I always keep second guessing myself, and my methods of delivery. I guess it doesn’t matter so much if you are giving something like Bonnisan, for example, but if you are giving a medicine where you don’t want an overdose because of side effects, or underdose because you want it to be effective, like my recent experience with Atarax, it becomes important to be very exact about how much you are giving your little baby. With them having such tiny bodies, I guess the scope for getting out of the margin of the dose for their weight is quite narrow.
Also notice how life has a way to see that the most inexperienced mothers naturally have babies who need to be dosed in small and careful quantities. By the time your child is big enough for it not to matter much whether you give a dropper or half a desert spoon, you already are an expert.
Here are the ways I tried, and the problems/difficulties I faced with them…..
- The obvious – drops from the dropper straight into the mouth. This clearly is the best way to go about doing it, and works wonderfully with stuff that tastes good. Particularly when Nisarga happily opens his mouth when told or when he sees a spoon or dropper coming near. When it comes to medicine that Nisarga doesn’t like, there is no way he will voluntarily open his mouth for more drops. Then it comes down to a struggle to force his mouth open, which if you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you know I hate to do. I will, if I must, but I prefer hunting around for better ways. Not to mention that Nisarga loses patience with this method quickly even when he likes the taste.
- Using the dropper to put the correct number of drops into a spoon (+1 drop) and then giving him the whole dose in one go. Works best so far, but kind of negates the convenience of the dropper. I add that one drop because when I give Nisarga the medicine, I’ve seen that a small amount remains in the spoon, which looks about as much as one drop.
- Seeing how much the desired number of drops fill the dropper by filling it and dropping the medicine back into the bottle, and then simply filling the dropper to the exact level and squirting the lot in at one go. This is time consuming, but works fairly well. And once I know how much it is, I don’t need to repeat the experimentation every time (though I do “recheck” once in a while to make sure that things are indeed as I remember them)
- Buying a separate dropper with quantities marked on it and converting number of drops to ml that can be measured directly with the dropper. Now, this is a proper set up and not as simple as it sounds, because it immediately means that I have to clean that dropper regularly, store it correctly, and remove the plastic dropper plugs on some medicines (like Bonnisan and Atarax, for example) to enable me to be quick when it comes to giving them to him. This means, that if I lose those plastic plugs, I can’t go back to dropping straight from the bottle. However, this is the best in ensuring that he gets absolutely the correct dose.
Dang, maybe I’m over-thinking this.
What about you? Do you wonder about these things? What do you do to ensure that your baby gets the medicine exactly as prescribed?