Even though I ordered off of the kids menu until 9 or 10 years old, I’ve always been told I was an old soul.
I enjoyed my friends’ parents’ company as much as — and in some cases more than — that of my friends. My taste in entertainment was at least two generations my senior, and for a while, so was my taste in men.
With the exception of grape chewable Tylenol tablets, flavored medicine was rarely something I’d take without a fight. As a 90s kid, I fell victim to pre-Google gullibility. My parents could get me to take medicine with the looming threat of a jab instead of a syrup in suspension. Before the threats, there was often an attempt at mixology. My father, the pharmacist, would mix Dimetapp with Diet Coke (again, 90s kid) or chocolate pudding.
On the whole, my kids are different. For a routine fever-reducer, they toss back the dosing cup like a shot of something more sinister.
Antibiotics are where it gets dicey. Cefdinir, augmentin, amoxicillin, their infamous chalky appearance and near-rancid scents are inherently triggering. Amoxicillin may be bubblegum flavored, but its stronger, less charming cousin augmentin is putrid. The manufactured citrus scent competes with the aroma of chemicals that smell more like a poorly ventilated nail salon than anything remotely medicinal.
And herein lies the issue.
My 23-month-old (she’s just not two yet, OK?) needed a script for augmentin to kick her case of strep. I am unapologetically overbearing when husband volunteers to pick up a prescription. I was a step away from sending a smoke signal to remind him to get it flavored before he snapped that he knew what he was doing.
And yet still, we had a chalky white, citrusy substance to dose up and administer. Not even the faintest whiff of bubblegum, or our second choice, grape.
As we expected, she spit up the suspended dose.
What followed was two calls to the on-call pediatrician to remedy to issue. The first attempt was met with a suggestion to mix the medicine with chocolate syrup.
Sloane is too clever. She fed her doctored syrup to a Peppa Pig figurine. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t pass the sniff test.
And so we did the whole on-call song and dance once more.
By we, I mean me.
I finally identified the issue, which was that the lovely on-call pediatrician thought when we referenced “bubble gum” flavor, we were asking to prescribe amoxicillin in place of augmentin. After some well-intentioned restating of the request we landed on the same page: we needed a new script of augmentin and for the pharmacy to add additional flavor for a bubblegum disguise.
At long last, we were successful, Sloane was medicated, and as millennial parents, we breathed a sigh of relief instead of spiraling our ways to a solution.
Bubblegum can be used as an old-school zing, akin to modern day “basic,” and yet for the next ten days, I will lean into its elasticity more than its color, as I stretch the implication to something healing and restorative. May its textbook stickiness take with it every last trace of streptococcus.