Deworming the Child

About one month back, my 6-year-old nephew had a somewhat severe case of worms. It started with constipation, then itchy anus and alas, worms coming out of his anus. I was thankful not to have witnessed it but my mum described it to me.

If you were like me before, I had never, ever heard of worms infestation. I mean, parasites yes, but I didn't know they actually crawled out of you. Some of you might be familiar with the term gam zek, I thought it meant the child was malnutrition, not absorbing the nutrients from food well. But well, worms infestation is the real deal.

I did a bit of reading and it seems some doctors recommend deworming your child every 6 months. While the medicine kills the adult worms in the body if indeed present, the eggs are not killed, hence the 6 months treatment. You can read more about deworming here.

B had his 15th month check up with Dr Z last Saturday, and I took the opportunity to ask if it was necessary to have him dewormed. For Dr Z's practice, he normally does not actively treat for worms unless there are signs of infection. But having heard B in contact with my nephew, he went ahead and treated him as a precautionary measure. The treatment was simple - only 1 dose of 5ml required, the remaining 5ml can be kept for 6 months later. And with that, DH and I felt somewhat relieved. I think its the psychological factor.

That said, I look forward to each pd visit (touchwood! Of course just for his routine checks and vaccine and not when he's ill, which we are so thankful his first year went by without falling ill. Please don't jinx this.) Still extremely shy, he "fought" with Dr when it was jab time, quite a funny scene, and again, the number of people needed to distract him was embarrassing. Even the doctor had to join in singing "The Wheels on the Bus".

I did learn something interesting from Dr Z. He was asking about B's vocabulary and if we had started reading to him. I boastfully yet embarrassedly replied I did that long ago, and got a approval nod and "good" from him. When we told him B even wanted to have a say in the choice of books we read, he said, "ok, but don't give him too much choices." It's good to let him practice making decision via selection of books, but do not give him too many freedom in doing so. Maximum 2 books. As in with clothes selection, do not make the mistake of letting them choose what to wear. Thankfully he doesnt have a say in what he's wearing, but the selection of books, we basically just let him go to the shelf and pick whatever he wants. An interesting perspective presented by Dr Z... we'll try to see if there's any difference when we adopt his method.