.

Nov. 26, 2006

Bitter medicine

A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down—at least that’s what the song in “Mary Poppins” says.

For Caroline, it would take a lot more than that. We haven’t yet found anything that makes medicine more palatable for her, from bribing her with a soda chaser (or juice, or water or any other child-friendly beverage of her choice) to admitting that sometimes medicine does taste pretty awful and the best strategy is just to hold your nose, gulp it down and get it over with.

Caroline would prefer to use delaying tactics, putting off the moment of actually having medicine cross her lips until she gets better on her own.

Caroline is eight now, maybe old enough to know better, but she’s always detested the taste of medicine. When she was 2fi, after having surgery on her face, she bumped the corner of her mouth that was full of stitches with the hard plastic head of a baby doll.

As she screamed in pain, I sent my husband to the kitchen to get her Tylenol with codeine—it was less than 15 minutes until time for her next dose, and she was in severe pain.

But she heard me tell him to get it, and, fighting to speak between sobs, she cried, “No, Mama. I’ll stop crying. But no medicine. Please no medicine.”

My heart broke for her that day. I knew that sometimes she would need medicine, like it or not, no matter how hard it was to take. And for her, it is hard. The only medicine we ever found that she liked was the bubble gum pink amoxicillin—and she turned out to be allergic to it, leading to several doses of Benadryl, which she hates.

Most recently, she turned up her nose and turned her face away from a dose of cough syrup—just something to soothe a nagging, tight cough, left over from a cold.

She didn’t want it, but eventually she took it, and the cough stopped and she was able to get some sleep that night.

That didn’t happen until after drawn-out arguments about whether she needed it—arguments her father and I responded to by repeating that sometimes she has to accept that her parents do so know best what is good for her, and that what is good for her isn’t always pleasant.

But that’s the way of the world—for everyone. Often, what is good for people isn’t pleasant (how many adults out there are overdue for dental or physical exams?) and often, we have to do things we don’t want to do, for our own good or the good of those around us. Sometimes, we just have to accept that someone else knows better.

Caroline’s not ready to accept that. Looking at me over the medicine cup, she asked, “Mom, why can’t I just take a pill?”

Martin is a Catholic New World staff writer. Contact her at [email protected]