Last night we celebrated two of my Uncle's birthdays...My Uncle Rob and Uncle Mike. We made the short drive out to Fruitland for a good time and good food. Noah was feeling under the weather, a little bit of an understatement...he had a temperature of 104.5 YIKES!! We held out giving him Tylenol and kept a really close eye on him, taking his temp throughout the night. Dusty slept with him to keep a better eye on him. His fever finally broke and Noah spent most of the day with a temp of 100.4
You are probably wondering why we didn't give him something to bring the fever down...we were allowing his body to function the way God created it to. When your body gets a fever, the body gets really hot and the infection can't live and dies off and the fever "breaks". If we suppress the fever we don't let the body kill the infection with the heat and we allow the infection to stay alive in the body.
We did keep a cool cloth on Noah's head to protect the head from getting to hot and killing brain cells. The cool cloth doesn't bring down the bodies core temperature so we weren't doing the same thing the Tylenol would have done.
Don't get me wrong, it's still scary and part of me needed a little "coaching" from a friend. It's so hard to break habits...my old mind says "Baby is sick, get the Tylenol" because that's what I've done in the past and it works right? I used to think it works, but it really doesn't. We think it works because the baby has a temperature and we gave him Tylenol and now the temperature is gone, so it worked...WRONG! We treated the symptom of a problem. The fever is a symptom, letting us know that there is a problem and now we've taken the symptom away but we didn't take the problem away...the baby is still sick, he just doesn't have a fever anymore.
I'm still learning and walking along this road less traveled but I sure feel good about it...Noah is doing 90% better tonight. Hopefully he will be completely well tomorrow....Please pray that none of the other kids get sick.
You are probably wondering why we didn't give him something to bring the fever down...we were allowing his body to function the way God created it to. When your body gets a fever, the body gets really hot and the infection can't live and dies off and the fever "breaks". If we suppress the fever we don't let the body kill the infection with the heat and we allow the infection to stay alive in the body.
We did keep a cool cloth on Noah's head to protect the head from getting to hot and killing brain cells. The cool cloth doesn't bring down the bodies core temperature so we weren't doing the same thing the Tylenol would have done.
Don't get me wrong, it's still scary and part of me needed a little "coaching" from a friend. It's so hard to break habits...my old mind says "Baby is sick, get the Tylenol" because that's what I've done in the past and it works right? I used to think it works, but it really doesn't. We think it works because the baby has a temperature and we gave him Tylenol and now the temperature is gone, so it worked...WRONG! We treated the symptom of a problem. The fever is a symptom, letting us know that there is a problem and now we've taken the symptom away but we didn't take the problem away...the baby is still sick, he just doesn't have a fever anymore.
I'm still learning and walking along this road less traveled but I sure feel good about it...Noah is doing 90% better tonight. Hopefully he will be completely well tomorrow....Please pray that none of the other kids get sick.
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2 comments:
Wow that would be so hard to do. I am one that runs for the medicine as soon as possible for the girls. I think I'll spend some time reading up on this tonight. thanks for the lesson :)
I completely understand your thinking on this one. I am so hesitant to put drugs in my own body and when I have kids it will be the same. Fevers are the way our body kills the infection so I think you are doing the right thing! Keep it up! -Angie :-)
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