Daddy's New Medicine

Wednesday morning at 5:00am I was very tired. Brooke and I had both been up with Amanda much of the night Tuesday night, Brooke had been up with her for a couple hours earlier Wednesday night, and then Amanda came to wake me up at 5:00am crying with elbow pain. I brought her back down to the couch in my office, prayed for her and explained that I could not give her any medicine yet. She had already asked for it 3 times.

We had been giving her Ibuprofen rather than the Hydrocodone that she got a prescription for at the hospital because it seemed to be helping more, but we were getting concerned that she was taking it every four hours for almost 2 days. Besides that, as she asked for her medicine a fourth time, I realized the medicine had become a "miracle cure" for her. Five minutes after taking the medicine, Amanda would say she was feeling better. Ibuprofen does not work that quickly.

I'm not sure if it was sleep deprivation or divine revelation, but I told Amanda, "I cannot give you any more of your regular medicine, but let me see if I can find something else. I left her on the couch and went to the kitchen. I found her little medicine cup, grabbed some of Brooke's Fuze vitamin fruit drink, poured it into the cup then tried to figure out some way to make it taste like medicine. The refrigerator door was open and the Pepto Bismol was right there, so I grabbed it and put just a drop or two in the mix. I stirred it up and presented it to Amanda as pain relieving medicine. I say this in all honesty...her pain subsided within 2 minutes and within 10 minutes she was asleep again!

After the second use, Amanda became a bit suspicious (the lack of a medicine bottle and the distinct Pepto taste), but it worked twice and that was enough to get us through the rough spots. We are down to medicine once in the morning and once at night, so 'Daddy's new medicine' did the trick.