The Pink Medicine at Bedtime

What the doctor said

She did not lecture him. That is the thing I keep coming back to.

I had been ready for a lecture, and some part of me had wanted one, and she did not give one. She explained it plainly, the way she would explain an ear infection.

“This is children’s Benadryl,” she said. “The medicine in it is called diphenhydramine. It’s an antihistamine. It’s for allergies, for hives, for a runny nose in hay fever season. Sleepiness is a side effect. It’s not what it’s for.”

She turned the bottle so Josh could see the label. “The box says it right on the back. Do not use to make a child sleepy. We don’t recommend it for sleep in children. The pediatricians’ association doesn’t, and I don’t.”

Josh was staring at the bottle like it might bite him. “It’s over the counter,” he said. “You can buy it at the gas station. Kendra sells it at the truck stop.”

“You can buy it anywhere,” Dr. Hagen said, not unkindly. “A lot of things you can buy at the gas station aren’t meant for a six-year-old every night. Most parents don’t know that. That’s why I’m telling you.”

Then she told him why. The sleep it gives a child is not normal sleep, she said. It sedates him.

A child can sleep ten hours on it and still wake up tired, because it is not the same kind of rest.

“And it hangs on,” she said. “The next morning, sometimes into the next day. That’s your Monday, Megan. That’s his head on the desk at school.”

She said children get used to it, so after a while it does not work as well, and that is when people start giving a little more.

She said some children get the opposite effect, wound up and cranky instead of sleepy.

“Too much of it can make a child’s heart race,” she said.

“It can make them confused, or see things that aren’t there. In an overdose it can cause seizures. Poison control gets calls about it all the time, mostly from good people who didn’t know.”

She said the other danger was mixing. “If he gets a cold, and somebody gives him a nighttime cold medicine that has the same ingredient in it, now he’s getting a double dose, and nobody meant to do it.”

Josh put his face in his hands. He was not crying. He just put it there, the way he did the day his dad died, like his face was suddenly too heavy to hold up by itself.

“I didn’t know,” he said through his fingers. “Meg, I swear to God I didn’t know. I’m not home. I get home at ten and they’re all asleep. I thought she was just good at it.”

“I know you didn’t,” I said. It was the first thing I had said since we walked in. And it was true.

I could see it was true. I had known it on the kitchen floor, really, and that was what had scared me most.

Dr. Hagen let that sit for a second. Then she told him the good part, and I think she had saved it on purpose.