My Machalot*: Part One
As we approach the five year mark of being a parent, we have been through a variety of illnesses of the standard variety. For some reason the “fun” ones seem to repeat several times. I’ll review them as they have come:
Pink-Eye (Hebrew: Daleket Anyaim): This one hit at age one and again about four more times before age three. (We seem to be having a break of this one.)
Recognizable symptoms: red eyes, sticky drippy stuff coming out of them
Downside: very contagous, no school/childcare for the first 24-48 hours after the medicine has started–or until the stickiness is gone.
Upside: Child is healthy enough to be schlepped to any activity that you need to get done.
Important notes: Wash hands as often as possible in order to prevent infection. Make sure to clean the eyes well before putting in the antibiotic drops, or you really aren’t doing anything!
Story from the front lines: One particularly bad instance was when we were in the Absorption Center. We tried two different antibiotics, and nothing was making it go away. We even went to an opthamologist, but he didn’t have any answers. A Russian neighbor told me to talk to his wife. She gave me something from Russia to clean her eyes (I never found out what it was.) and told me to use a homeopathic drops (Opti-dol). Within two days she was better. It could have been that it was a virus that ran it’s course, but I now keep Opti-dol in the house.
*Machalot: Hebrew for Illness
