OK, we're back.

2/14/04: Thursday was a decent day. We dropped the Flagyl suspension and went back to the crushed pills in applesauce. It wasn't a great day, but Rebecca took all 3 doses, none of them came up, she even ate some plain noodles and kept them down. She's understandably famished. She lost 3 pounds this week.

Friday was a different story.

She threw up first thing in the morning. She threw up 1/2 way through her applesauce dose. Off to the doctor we went.
After 3 hours there, we left as we had come, but with some new ideas to try like splitting the dose over several minutes, mixing it in jam, peanut butter, or yogurt. PB is out, she won't eat it. Yogurt we didn't have on hand. So, I started grinding to mix it into jam.
For the first time when grinding I had some pill powder on my fingers. And I licked.
Let me just say that I've had to take a hardline with Rebecca about these pills. If it were me, I'd need someone with a bullwhip telling me that I had to take them under pain of death. Because she feels better and doesn't understand why she has to continue, I have had to get extremely forceful in my insistence. It wasn't pretty. They are worse than anything, and I only had a taste. She has chewed entire pills. She has complained and gagged and cried, but she has taken them. I don't know that I could do the same.
But I've come up with an idea that just might get us through the next 5 days. A couple years back my mom had bought a Jell-o jellybean mold. I have a pack of Jell-O. What these pills need is a way to get them down with minimal taste. They need a slick coating. Jell-o.
So I prepped a Jell-o jiggler recipe, filled up the mold then dropped in the dosage into several Jell-o beans. They are too big to swallow whole, unfortunately, but I think we've made them a smidgen more tolerable. Not to say that she doesn't throw a royal fit every time med time comes around.
We have promised her a Swan Lake Barbie when she completes this course.
Of course her question at bedtime was "What if this medicine doesn't work?" I told her we'll cross that bridge when we get to it, but right now our goal it to take all the medicine she has to as that's the best way to ensure that the amoebas will die.
If you're reading this, can you say a small prayer that come Thursday we are done with the entire episode? I know in the grand scheme of things our problems aren't truly significant. After all, no one is going to die. But it's been a long 3 weeks and we could use some healthy household vibes.
Oh, a side effect we didn't expect from this. Her hair seems to be falling out. A case of the cure being so violent on her small frame as to be almost worse than the disease. As her mom, I cried.