Back to "Normal"

Mac came down with the dreaded strep this weekend. I put on my doctor hat, got out my flashlight which I used to examine the strep-infected throat, and declared my diagnosis.

That pesky, villainous, evil strep.

And this being Bogota, I then went next door and bought a course of Amoxicillin - sans doctor's prescription- so I could get my boy on the road to recovery.

I tried to look up the correct dosage for Mac's weight, but let's be honest. I didn't really know what his exact weight was in the first place. And the equation I found on the Internet used kilograms and even had I known Mac's weight in pounds, I would have had to calculate what that was in kilos to make that equation work and I always have to think hard whether you multiply by 2.2 or divide by 2.2. It seemed like a lot of work so I emailed a friend whose child had recently had strep and just used his dosage.

So Mac got a dose on Saturday afternoon, two on Sunday and one this morning. But he still wasn't where I thought he needed to be after so many doses, so I took him to the health unit this morning. Turns out my skills as a diagnostician are spot-on. But my skills as a prescription writer need some work. After four doses of antibiotic, he still tested positive for strep. I under-medicated him (but at least I didn't get yelled at for giving him antibiotics unnecessarily).

Mac came home after that to be babied by "Ms. Ruth", who made him soup, bought him a 12-pack of BBQ potato chips (because that apparently is a home remedy for curing strep), and let him eat ice cream. Oh, and she gave him that extra dosage of medicine that I neglected to give on Saturday and Sunday. By the time I got home at 4:45, my boy was brand new.

Do you want to know how I knew he was back to normal? He was playing and talking to himself. Or talking to the imaginary person he was playing with, I'm not sure which. But he talks to himself or that imaginary person a lot when he's well and he hadn't done that at all since Saturday, so I knew he back to normal. Or as normal as someone can be who talks a lot when there's nobody else around.

And that makes me very happy.