Yes, this is a 2 AM post due to a 1:30 AM wake up call to miserable wailing in the night. I've lost track of just how much the kiddo weighs at this point. At the last check-up at the doc's, the kiddo was 61+ lbs, which would have put the dosage to 12.5 mL (2.5 teaspoons) of the pain relieving medicine (if we had it in the house).
The first thing I did was not to look up the actual dosage to the above nonexistent meds in the house but to look up "holistic 'tylenol' for kids." I had no idea what my search engine results would fetch. Other terms I suppose that I could have looked up would have been: "home remedies for growing pains" or something else along the same lines.
Anyway, the first thing I saw were scary articles on the internet that warned people from using acetaminophen in the first place!
- According to a six-year study in Hepatology, "researchers found that 42% of 662 cases of acute liver failure in 22 clinical settings were caused by acetaminophen poisoning, and 29% of the individuals suffering from acetaminophen toxicity died."
- According to an article on Medscape, overdosing on acetaminophen causes 56,000 emergency room visits, 26,000 hospitalizations and 458 deaths annually.
- Acetaminophen can cause changes in liver function, contribute to liver toxicity, liver problems or outright liver failure. in the liver and cause liver toxicity. Children's livers are far smaller than adults. The search results listed all kinds of things, such as seasonal allergies and autism and a product recall.
Tomatoes. We didn't have tomatoes in the house. If we did, they had already been blended with onions and bell peppers for a soup base and stocked in the freezer. Out went the first item.
Olive oil. We had plenty of that. I gave my kiddo a teaspoon of olive oil. Then I went down the list and crossed out the rest.
Dark green leafy vegetables. We only had kale in the house, which took too much time to wash and cook and soften the stalky part of the vegetable. I suppose I could have given the kiddo raw kale greens (as opposed to the stalk). In all honesty, I did not think of the raw kale option amidst the on-demand wails at my ears.
Nuts. We did not have almonds or walnuts in the house. Out went that option.
Fish. We had frozen salmon, canned tuna and canned sardines. I put the salmon on the stove, then thought better of it and opened a can of tuna to heat up. All the while the kiddo was roaming the house, totally miserable and grieving from the pain in the knee in particular.
Berries. We did have frozen blueberries, but using the powerful in-house blender to liquefy these berries to enable fast assimilation and absorption would have woken up the husband. I was going to use the blueberries as a last resort, if the kiddo was still in pain.
Since I had to stay at the stove for the salmon to be thoroughly cooked, as I was standing there the wailings stopped and the kiddo was entirely happy to go to bed. The raw salmon often takes about twenty minutes to cook. I'd say that I was a third of the way there when the kiddo retired to bed.
All in all, if I were to put a time frame to this debacle, the anti-inflammatory foods worked within twenty minutes. Not bad, eh?
Like my posts? Please support my writing at Patreon.