Fabulous News

Excellent news - our son is healthy.

Effective immediately, our little guy comes off his heart drugs. His recent holter (a device that monitors his heart rate for a 24-hour period) showed thousands of beats and only one irregular one.

A special thanks to Dr. Joel Kirsh and the entire Sick Kids team for saving our son’s life and making him the healthy almost one-year-old that he is.

Going With The Flow

For the first time in 10 months our son is sick - OK, outside of the heart thing.

Our son has an ear infection, which has caused a cold complete with sneezing and a cough that has deepened and created a raspy voice.

Despite my best intentions to keep our son drug-free, he is heart medication, amoxicillin, Tempra and vitamin D.

It goes to show you when you have kids, you have to go with the flow.

Bringing Cheap To A Whole New Level

My son has been on heart medication since he was airlifted to Sick Kids hospital in Toronto when he was one-month-old.

The medication is an old man’s drug but instead of getting an old-man dosage of 200 milligrams, my son gets 20 mg once a day. As the medication is created for my son, only one hospital has the capsule maker to create it - the Shoppers Drug Mart at Sick Kids itself.

Each month, a week before I run out of my son’s medication, I call Shoppers to ask them to make my medication, giving them three days notice. (The medication has an expiry date so I can’t order too far in advance. Shoppers’ pharmacists require three days to get the medication ready for some reason.)

My brother-in-law’s girlfriend and now my husband have been going downtown since December to pick up my son’s medication, with our drug company covering all but $10 of the $53 bill.

So here is where I am annoyed.

My son obviously can’t swallow an adult-sized capsule. I have to break it open, mix it with sterilized water and draw it up into a syringe. My son sucks it out from there.

Shoppers charges us for the syringes.

I paid with credit card for the first few months so I didn’t notice the charge. My husband pays cash and he told me the drug store charges us 15 cents for each syringe, with each syringe lasting a few months.

Are you kidding me? Is Shoppers so cheap it can’t provide syringes for free? The drug store is the only one that can make the medication. We are forced to go to Shoppers. We are forced to work on their schedule and we are forced to drive more than a hour to get it. And they can’t provide a 15-cent syringe for free.

Pathetic really.