Milestones

We have strep throat. It came late this year. Usually, the first child complains of a sore throat and promptly throws up just in time to miss participating in the school's winter concert, or if we are really lucky, they'll hold out for a Christmas Eve onset making them equally cranky and hopped up on candy canes. We are more than a month behind our regular schedule, so I guess I should be grateful (I'm not exactly sure why though, I still have three kids with strep).

Anyway, strep is a pain in that for the six hours between the diagnosis and the amoxicillin taking effect you are forced to deal with a cranky, demanding, exceptionally whiny child who actually deserves to be a cranky, demanding, exceptionally whiny child (and therefore totally delegitimizes your urge to strangle said cranky, demanding whiner). But overall, compared to a lot of other childhood afflictions, strep really isn't that bad. And sometimes, something good can come of it. For example, I hit a major milestone yesterday that I may have had to wait just a little bit longer for and it was only because my kids had strep. For the first time in nine years of pediatric visits, I knew for sure that when it came down to me or the doctor - I had the upper hand.

A little background: I am the type of person who invariably acquiesces to medical authority. When it comes to anything medical, I tend to simply do what I am told. Wait a second, before you give up on me, assuming I am spineless or maybe even too lazy to question medical authority, think about this: I always work under the assumption that I didn't spend my most critical social development years locked away in medical school whereas physicians did, therefore while I gained an ability to relate to mankind during that time, doctors had to have gained something too and since it wasn't necessarily social skills it MUST have been a vast medical knowledge. This reasoning of course supports the related theory that you shouldn't really trust a doctor that seems too normal, too cool (which is why the Olivia Wilde character on House is totally unbelievable and why I would totally let Doogie Howser MD perform neurosurgery on me if necessary).

So what was so different about yesterday's visit to the pediatrician? Well for one, I'm pretty certain that the doctor that examined my children was, well younger than me! This hasn't happened before. When we first brought my daughter, now eight, to this office, we picked the youngest, hippest (use my above comments to qualify the adjective "hip") doc on staff. But she still had a good fifteen years on us and even if she weren't a pediatrician, as a mother of three she knew way more about kids' health than we did as parents of a three-day old. Yesterday, our regular pediatrician wasn't available and my children were examined instead by the practice's new girl-doctor (that's not rude, it’s accurate). As soon as she opened the door to our little examining room, I knew it would be important for me to seize control of the situation. I could tell for certain that, for once, I had more experience with children and common childhood illnesses than this doctor and If I didn't tell her what was wrong, who needed to be tested, and in what order they should be tested, I would be doing a disservice to both my children and the doctor. Moreover, if I didn't demand that -regardless of the test results- all three children would walk out with prescriptions for whatever antibiotic they hadn't had last time (because even I know it’s a good idea to rotate them), I'm sure we would have spent at least an extra hour in that office not to mention the two additional trips I would be making later in the week for the children who didn't appear to be afflicted but clearly were by virtue of their proximity to the eight year old ball of misery they spent most of their time with. Of course, I was as gentle as could be in guiding her to the decision that she would in fact be giving all three children throat cultures and we would not be waiting to confirm the results of the 24 hour test before starting medication.

And that special combination of gentle and firm, disarming and bossy that only mothers and awesome bargain sale shoppers have, really took hold of that doctor. In no time, she was offering me treatment options I never even knew existed. She said things like, "how would they like their medicine?" I tried to play it cool, so as not to give up my hard-won authority, but until that moment I knew of only one style of children's medication - the thick sticky bubblegum flavored liquid that you suspect tastes like earwax (but you would never, ever admit that to your kids.) The newbie also told me that if you wanted you could still have your kids take their strep antidote in a single dose, with a shot - just like I did at least once every winter of my childhood. This was incredible information, the pediatrics version of classified information, I have been inquiring about this shot for at least seven years and all of the older, experienced doctors had sworn it was no longer available. This girl was so new at this, she didn't even know what she was giving away!

In the end, we opted for the liquid version of amoxicillin, because I guessed it was better to spread the hassle out over ten days then to try to get three screaming kids out of the office, down an elevator and through an icy parking lot. And besides, my third grader was smart enough to have figured out that the shot wasn't in fact the only choice.

The gravity of the situation dawned on me on the way home from the doctor's office (just before I got totally distracted by the hell that is Target with three sick kids), suddenly I am older than someone. Suddenly, I have more experience than someone. Suddenly, I might know just a little bit more than an expert. And that expert someone isn't one of my own kids. I'm not sure if this is depressing or enlightening or both.

Probably I'll ask for our old doctor back the next time, afterall, she is our “old” doctor.