How To Get Kids To Swallow Pills

A spoonful of icing helps the medicine go down.
The medicine go down.

It's good to be home! I think?

We all slept great. No one came in and turned on the lights to take Vinny's temperature or dispense intravenous antibiotics. There were no babies wailing in pain, or suffering, sick children.

But then we woke up to our ongoing medical reality.

"It's 7:30," I say. "We're late on the antibiotics."

"Rrrrrrrriiiiiing! blares my Emergency Response Nervous System. "Let's bring this baby up a few levels. Ready, set and release the adrenaline!"

A totally inappropriate response in my opinion. We're talking pill swallowing here Internet. It isn't as if I'm being chased down by a hungry lion. My nervous system needs an upgrade. Or a massage.

At 7:30 I made the mistake of dosing Vinny with his first antibiotic, he's taking two, on an empty stomach, because I was in a hurry. That won't happen again.

"I feel nauseous," says Vinny. "I think I'm going to throw up."

"Nooooooo," I say. "You can't throw up, you still have an abscess. No throwing up, unless you want to end up back in the hospital."

And that worked, he didn't vomit. That time.

I wait 15 minutes then ask Vinny, "What do you want for breakfast?"

"I don't feel good," says Vinny. "I don't want to eat."

Those are the last words any parent wants to hear out of their kid's mouth the day after being discharged from the hospital. If I never step foot into another hospital, it would be too soon.

"I'll make some toast," I say. "It will make you feel better."

He ate and kept down the toast. He seemed fine. At 8:00 a.m. it was time to give him Cipro, the second antibiotic, which he only takes twice a day. The other antibiotic, Flagyl, has to be taken four times a day. That's a lot of pill swallowing in most people's books, especially a 9-year-old's.

I thought I'd make it easier for him by cutting the pill in half. Wrong.

He swallowed both halves. Shortly thereafter the trouble began, and by trouble, I mean vomiting.

Thinking quickly, I scan the vomit and see both halves of the pill, somehow they ended up attached to each other, though they were swallowed at different times. Weird, I never thought of vomit as being organized. Like attracts like, I suppose.

Swiftly, but gently I reach in and scoop out the reunited lovers with my fingers.

Then I delicately rinse the barf juice off the squishy pill halves. Wow, stomach acid is fast-acting! Those babies were hard as a rock when Vinny swallowed them.

I mixed the antibiotics up in soy milk, which by the way Cipro should not be taken with dairy OR calcium fortified drinks. Too late.

"It tastes terrible!" shouts Vinny. "I can't drink it."

"You have to," I say.

"I can't," he says.

We went round and round like this for five minutes, but eventually he drank it down. At this point I was ready to order an IV machine and hook him up to it myself.

With the help of our Angelic Pediatrician we came up with a cheaper, less barbaric solution, though I doubt her advice came from anything she learned in med school. But who knows, maybe?




"A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, the medicine go down, the medicine go down," sings The Pediatrician. "Give him the pill in apple sauce or honey."

Vinny doesn't like apple sauce. I had honey in the cupboard. Hubby went to the store, and picked up squeezable chocolate icing, in case the honey wasn't palatable.

At 11 a.m. it was time to take the day's second dose of Flagyl. After Vinny ate a pancake, I put some chocolate icing on a spoon, next the pill, then smothered it in more chocolate icing.

"Okay, are you ready to swallow it?" I ask.

"No, no, no," says Vinny. "I'm not ready. I don't think I can do it."

"Yes you can," I say. "If you don't want to end up back in the hospital, you will. Come on, just swallow it."

And he did. Phew.

The 5 o'clock medicine dispensal didn't go as well.

"No, I'm not taking it," refuses Vinny.

Eventually he did, but if things keep going this way, December 29, the date of Bloody Bill's hopeful departure, won't come soon enough.