Well, the Monster’s fever has broken, from what we can tell, so he’s going back to school tomorrow.

I have to say that it’s been interesting, dealing with his first real illness as a child.  He’s never really been sick – perhaps a sniffle or two, but nothing like this – and it was interesting to deal with.

On some level, I’ll confess that at its height, I was hoping a little bit for something I’ve heard of in other blog posts and articles – for him to briefly be lucid, be ‘normal’, if only because of the fever.  But alas, it was not meant to be, and we’ll be honest in my admitting that I did not think that it was going to happen regardless.

The biggest problem that we had, though, was that our picky eater did not want to take medicine.  It was unfamiliar to him and he was just not going to tolerate it.

We tried a few different variations – we tried a children’s liquid medicine (that he spat out all over me), a dissolving strip (which took both of us wrestling him to get him not to get it off his tongue before dissolving) and pills when we told him were vitamins (and that he refused to eat).  The wife even tried to force-feed him the cold pills, but no dice – I really ended up with more of it spat up all over my hand than in his mouth.

So, I went to Twitter, in its infinite wisdom.  I got a variety of suggestions, a few that seemed to ignore my obvious flagging of the Monster as having Autism (suggesting I be rational and talk to him like an adult about germs and the like, with diagrams), one or two messages that were horrified that I would Ever Give My Autistic Son OTC Medication.  A few that suggested having the pharmacy work him up something to appeal to his taste buds.  Most suggested outright bribery or just suffering through it.

In the end – it turned out the cold-pills that the wife bought dissolved nicely in his juice, so we ‘tricked’ him into taking them… but I hope we don’t have to deal with this kind of problem in the future…