Naughty children get (char)coal.

So today I was going to discuss wrestling with squash in a square foot garden (don't worry the wrestling match did occur and you'll hear all about it tomorrow) but I'd rather talk about yesterday when Lola said her tummy hurt and she needed medicine.



I thought she was referring to her eczema and that she wanted the all natural ointment we've been using. We keep it next to the bed, so I told her to go get it. She came back with the children's Tylenol (she just got over a virus that included a fever last week so it must have been on my dresser) and I said no and put it back on (what i thought was) a fairly high desk and asked her if she wanted milk in a big girl cup instead.

She said yes and I went to fill a sippy cup with milk.  Cup in hand I called out her name and she came running. She was holding the bottle of Tylenol in one hand (how did she get it off the desk?!)  with no cap and a telltale cherry colored mustache.

UTTER PANIC.

I looked in the bottle and there seemed to be about 1/4 of it left. We had just bought the bottle as she was ill last week. We had given her at the most 4 doses at a teaspoon each. The bottle had been basically full.

I called the pediatrician. The pediatrician said to go to the ER. She was in a diaper and I was pj's so I had to decide if taking her naked but sightly faster was better parenting than taking her with clothes on. I decided on the clothes.

Once there I was told I should have called poison control and brought the bottle. Hopefully this will never have to be recalled but it has been seared into my brain.

So instead my wonderful patient roommate read everything on the bottle painstakingly over the phone trying to find the concentration of the medication.  While I repeated the information to a nurse who repeated into the phone to poison control.

Long story short: she had to drink what seemed like a gallon of inky black liquid - activated charcoal - and 4 hours later when they took her blood her liver levels seemed fine so we didn't have to do the 24 hour IV treatment that prevents liver damage when overdosing on acetaminophen.

BREATHE.

We've had several very serious talks about how important it is to not take too much medicine and that only Mommy or Daddy can give her medicine. She's repeated it back to us unbidden a few times in the day since the incident.

Lessons learned: I need to recalibrate my brain to childproof another foot higher. Children's medicine isn't always in childproof caps.

One last thing - activated charcoal looks the same coming out as it does going in. Not pretty.

Here's a photo of my poor Lola about halfway through the process.

The black lips remind me of high-school. Oh I can hardly wait for what she has in store for me then.