Books: "If Your Kid Eats This Book..."

[ricevermicelli]

After our last ER trip for Danger Lad!, we decided we needed reference material, and someone, somewhere (possibly NPR?) recommended If Your Kid Eats This Book, Everything Will Still Be Okay, and we have it now.

I think this is a much better reference for parents of newborns than it is for parents of toddlers. I already know, for example, that spit-up out the nose or shooting across the room is not an emergency. I know that a screaming child is a breathing child, that short falls are seldom harmful, that the baby should sleep on its back until it can flip itself over of its own volition. I don't need a book for that stuff anymore, but it might have been nice to have such a book back when I hadn't yet internalized the difference between a laundry problem and a health problem.

My major concern about the shortcomings of this book is that it doesn't spend as much time on injuries as I'd like. Toddlers are like little injury-generating machines. Thinking about it, however, if your kid is seriously injured, do you have time to flip through for the section on broken bones? Not so much. If you can recall that you read once that you can improvise a splint out of rolled up newspaper and some tape, that's as good as it's going to get.

If you have or are planning to have an infant, and don't mind seriously mainstream assumptions (the author assumes you had internal fetal monitoring during labor and that you're getting all vaccines), it's a good reference. This is a great book for people who have time to read about all the things that might happen to their babies and how they should cope. (In the newborn stage, I read The Happiest Baby on the Block from cover to cover, and it had far less informational content than this.) If you have a toddler and don't know some basic first aid already, take a class, and also, program the number for poison control into your phone, but you're already past most of the material here, and if you have to stop and look up what to do for profuse bleeding, you're going to wind up using the book to apply direct pressure when a paper napkin or the remains of your t-shirt would be a better choice.

Comments

[naomikritzer]

The one situation where I have both enough fear to think it might possibly warrant an ER trip, and enough time to consult a book, is croup. Both my kids have had croup, infrequently enough that I never remember when it would be useful that (a) it's caused by inflammation so (b) an anti-inflammatory like baby Motrin might help. I do always remember to do the steam treatment, at least. I haaaaaaaate croup. It sounds so urgent and dire and scary, even if it isn't.

My evening Urgent Care trips have nearly all been the result of hyperactive phone nurses. Like the time Kiera complained of chest pain. She described the sort of thing that would be a genuine ER-worthy emergency in a 40-year-old. I've never heard of a 4-year-old having a heart attack, but I figured I should discuss this with a professional, just in case, so I called. They had me bring her in. After I brought her in, the doctor told me that the main concern was a broken clavicle. I could have told them over the phone she didn't have a broken clavicle, if I'd known that was what they were worried about. Sigh.

[zathrus.livejournal.com]

Croup is also irritating because sometimes, it really is that urgent. My first exposure to croup was three years ago, when my oldest got it badly enough and suddenly enough that she woke up screaming in the middle of the night, terrified that she couldn't breathe. We ended up in the ER (actually called for an ambulance -- she hadn't shown any symptoms at bedtime, it was the middle of the night, and we had no idea how fast her throat was closing up or what was wrong or if it would get worse or....), where they gave her two steroid treatments and an injection of something, and told us that if they'd had to give her one more treatment, they would have admitted her to the hospital for a day or two. We've since dealt with much more minor, slower-onset cases with relative ease, but that first one was terrifying. And even in the midst of dealing with ease and experience with a minor case, there's always that niggling question/fear in the back of my mind: Will this one get that bad? How do I tell when it crosses the line?

Injuries have sent us to the ER a time or two, but generally in a relaxed, "Yeah, that should probably get stitched up / X-rayed" sort of way. I don't know if this laid-back attitude is due to my mother's similar approach (she'd grown up the daughter of a small-town doctor) or my college First Responder training, but injuries don't phase me nearly as much as illness.

Newt

[naomikritzer]

Croup is also irritating because sometimes, it really is that urgent.

Oh yes, exactly. I mean, if I knew that it was just a matter of discomfort and sounding awful, I would comfort my child and put her back to bed rather than spending two hours listening to the awful rattle and thinking, "is she actually struggling to breathe? she SOUNDS like she's struggling. but she's not turning blue. she's calmed down now but what if I put her to bed and her throat swells shut?" etc.

That's the biggest thing I hate about croup.

I'm on the nurse's side

[drwex]

When I was going through adolescence I had some heart issues and saw a pediatric cardiologist. The catalog of things that can be wrong with a kid's heart and not be known until they suddenly manifest is truly frightening.

It's almost certainly not one of those problems - they're all pretty rare - but better safe than sorry. And the nurse on the phone has no way to know how observant and careful a mom you've been. You, being you, would know a lot about your kid's normal condition and know how abnormal the current episode is. Sadly a lot of parents wouldn't know that.

does this make me a terrible person?

[macthud]

my first thought when I saw your subject line?

"Eat the Menu!" by the Sugarcubes.

and then I got this picture in my head, of DL! slathering an ornate leathern folio with ice cream, and opening wide...

but I've banished it now.

so it can't possibly come true.
Hate the typo, fix my subject line...

[perspicuity.livejournal.com]

i should review that book at some point, just for the generic first aid/EMT/general-know-how, there are enough small-people around for it to be useful.

i'm kinda curious what the current thoughts on vaccines and allergens are. a lot of the rest seems kinda common sense - humans are rugged and we've been around a while.

#

[blk]

That sounds like a great book. I'm totally getting it for my parent-to-be friend. Thanks!

My one OMG-aieee-panic-call-911 emergency came from a febrile-seizure in my then-9-month-old, which a) had no warning and b) I'd never seen before. Scary stuff. Never did get used to it (in the next 10 times it happened), but after it was diagnosed it didn't need any more emergency room visits.