ParentMedic

By Jon McCarthy

ParentMedic is the most comprehensive book on how to manage common medical problems that most children will encounter and delivers textbook-quality information in a conversational, and often humorous, tone. It was written for parents, grandparents, teachers, babysitters, and anyone who may feel anxious about not knowing what to do if the child were to develop a medical complaint. If you fall into any of those categories, then this is the book for you. 

In addition to learning how to assess, and manage, a child for over 40 of the most common childhood medical complaints and conditions, the reader will also learn the importance of factors that contribute to a child's overall health. Things like nutrition, stress management, and how to create a safe environment for the child to thrive in. All of that, and probably too many dad jokes, are contained within the pages of ParentMedic.

Written by a veteran paramedic, and father, with over a half decade of experience working inside a pediatric emergency room. All content has been overseen, and approved, by both a board certified emergency medicine pediatrician and the former head of a maternal resource organization. This book both informs as it entertains the reader.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jon McCarthy
• Release date: Mar 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215184783

Jon McCarthy

Jon completed his paramedic training in 1997 in Tallahassee, Florida. As a paramedic, he has worked in both the rural EMS settings, as well on the streets of New Orleans, where he served as the co-creator, and head of the New Orleans EMS Field Training Officer Program for six years. Throughout his career, Jon has taught EMS at the college level, has worked as a flight medic, and an Emergency Room Paramedic at both Tulane University Hospital and Children's Hospital of New Orleans. He is the author of Hard Roll: A Paramedic's Perspective of Life and Death in New Orleans, Goodbye Bad Dreams, and the comicbook series, Endangered. He currently lives in New Orleans with his wife, two sons, an army of weenie dogs, and a few cats.

Book preview

ParentMedic

Book one: Illness

Written by: Jon McCarthy

Review and Consultation by: Dr. Audrey Le, MD & Anna Hoffpauir

Introduction

Iapplaud you for taking this proactive step for the safety and well-being of children. If you’ve just cracked this open and are wondering if this book is for you, I’ll answer with a question. Are you a parent, grandparent, foster parent, teacher, babysitter, or anyone who will ever care for a child? If yes, then this book was written for you. It is meant for anyone who experiences the natural fear of not knowing what to do when presented with a sick child.

Who am I? First and foremost, I am Logan and Gryphon’s dad. Besides being a parent, I’m also a paramedic and have worked in emergency medicine since 1996. My experience comes from ambulances, helicopters, movie sets, construction sites, and the emergency departments of a few hospitals, with the most recent being Children’s Hospital of New Orleans, where I spent five years treating pediatric emergencies in a bridge position between the providers and the nursing staff. Between my roles as both a parent and a medic, I have provided care for every illness and complaint I will be teaching you about as you embark upon your journey to become a ParentMedic.

My goal here is to deliver the most comprehensive and entertaining book on pediatric medical care for non-medical professionals. To help me accomplish that goal, I reached out to two awesome ladies. The first was my dear friend Anna Sites. A mother of two, Anna also served as the editor-in-chief and longtime staff member of Whole Mothering Center, a southeast-Texas-based maternal resource organization and peer-to-peer support community.  She has been there for me with everything I’ve written in the past several years and was the pre-publishing editor of my first published book, as she was for this one. In short, Anna is not only a super mom, but also a super-informed mom.

The second person I turned to was my friend and former co-worker, emergency pediatrician Doctor Audrey Le. Dr. Le graduated from the University of Mississippi’s School of Medicine in 2002 and is board certified in both pediatrics and pediatric emergency medicine. Audrey was my safety net when it came to the information provided in this book. She oversaw all of the treatment plans and has given them her approval as a brilliant pediatrician.

Fair warning dear reader, the book you are holding is not a textbook. The reading of textbooks ranks very low on my personal fun scale, and I assume the same applies to you. My approach was to create a readable book that entertains as it educates. I share a lot of personal stories, make a lot of jokes, and utilize an excessive amount of puns. The material is serious, but that doesn’t mean the teaching of it has to be. Let’s get started.

Is It An Emergency?

Iwas born on September 6, 1972, in Tallahassee, Florida, and grew up in the neighboring town of Crawfordville, which had a population of just over twenty thousand. I’m the older of two brothers, Joseph (3 years younger) and Jared (10 years younger). Both of my parents worked, so my brothers and I had a lot of unsupervised free time to nurture our vivid imaginations and satiate our affinity for mischief. I believe the term is latchkey kid and, in short, it was awesome.

During my childhood, getting injured or sick was considered as much of a rite of passage as barefoot backyard football games or roasting marshmallows around a yard fire on cool autumn nights. Maybe it was the time, the place, or both; but when something happened to one of us, treatment was typically handled at home. Trips to the emergency room were reserved for major disasters, like when Joseph fell out of a tree or was bitten by a rattlesnake after getting off of the school bus. It took a calamity of that magnitude to warrant a trip to the hospital in the McCarthy household.

Granted, the late 70s and early 80s were way different times than we live in today. But you know what? The flu was still the flu, a cut was still a cut, and the ringworms were still there, even if they wore parachute pants and sequined gloves. My point is that, although there are instances when kids will need to see a doctor, you don’t have to rush them to the hospital—or even the pediatrician’s office—for every little malady. You are perfectly capable of handling a lot of the small stuff yourself. Let me rephrase that. You will be capable, once you become a ParentMedic!

During those awesomely barbaric days of my computerless childhood, I have distinct memories of my mom hitting the books when we required medical attention. We had this set of medical encyclopedias that some savvy salesman convinced her to purchase, and when something happened to us, Moma would flip through the pages and try to find advice related to the problem at hand. When the printed page didn’t have the answer, she would turn to my grandmother, or some other old wife, and the castor oil would inevitably flow.

I’m not sure if I would go so far as to say that those encyclopedias saved our lives, but they provided some sort of an answer when parental instincts weren’t enough for the emergency at hand. Those encyclopedias are my motivational foundation, and a key inspiration, for writing this book. A major difference between those books and this one is that this book does contain information that can save your child’s life.

Babies do not come with an instruction manual! The best-case scenario is that you get a nine-month notice to learn all you can about the most complicated and valuable addition you will ever make to your life. As a father, I understand how the looming specter of fear can cause many sleepless nights for the loving parent.

On May 31, 2000, Logan Hunter McCarthy was born. I’d been a paramedic for a few years at that time and had already held many other people’s children’s lives in my hands. However, my professional experience did little to mitigate my worry when I became a dad. What my experience did provide me was the knowledge of how easily, and frequently, bad things can happen to children. So yeah, I was pretty scared when I held my boy in my arms for the first time.

There were two key things that I credit with helping me overcome the terror of becoming a dad. The first was having an amazing woman as my wife, and the second was the two-fold comfort provided by my training and knowledge of emergency medicine. Providing you with similar knowledge and training for handling emergencies is the purpose of this book. I’m sorry to say that you’re on your own with the spouse part.

You’ve already read that word, emergency, several times here. So what constitutes an actual emergency? Simply put, an emergency is whatever you, the parent or caregiver, perceive it to be. Another way of putting it is that the emergency is in the eyes of the beholder . . . with you being said beholder. In the modern world of emergency medicine, this concept causes a lot of indigestion for professional providers. When new parents call an ambulance for a hungry infant who is crying, it can be a bit frustrating. A quick assessment will reveal to the trained medical professional that the child is stable, but to the scared parent with zero medical training, the perception is that something is wrong and is therefore perceived to be an emergency. And you know what? That’s perfectly OK, because it is always better to err on the side of caution when it comes to the well-being of a child. However, the fact remains that most of the time when a child is entered into the world of emergency medicine, it is for something that isn’t considered an emergent complaint by the experienced provider. By becoming better acquainted with pediatric medicine, you become informed and more capable of identifying an actual emergency and then making the proper, informed, decision for what is best for your child. In other words, your beholder vision becomes much clearer.

Teaching emergency medical care, even at the introductory level, is comprehensive and can easily become overwhelming. This specialty field of medicine is composed of two subgroups: illness and injury. This book is the first part of the ParentMedic curriculum and will solely focus on managing illnesses, also known as medical complaints. Injuries (trauma) will be featured in a second volume. Both segments are incredibly complex and deserve an individual focus with respect to training to ensure that the material is truly learned.

I want you to consider this book a guide to help you make proper, informed decisions on the medical treatment, safety, and well-being of children. By no means should anything in the following pages be considered an alternative to the direction of your physician. Always keep in mind that, if an emergency arises, it is ultimately your responsibility to do whatever it takes to have your child evaluated by a physician. The last thing I want to accomplish with this book is to make you overly confident—or uncertain—about utilizing emergency services for a child in need. The goal here is to save lives, not take them. Please remember that.

Illness Prevention

Completely preventing illness in children is impossible. There are too many factors beyond your control. Daycares, schools, and all other public locations serve as breeding grounds for any and all communicable infectious agents that are floating around your community at any given time. So how can you limit your little one’s chances of getting sick? I realize this may sound a little crazy, but kids need to get sick. Yep, I said it . . . they need those germs. I’ll take it one step further and say that getting sick is a major key to living a healthy life. Whoa, hang on! Don’t throw the book away just yet! There is a method to my madness, I promise.

Human beings experience constant change as we age, but at no point in our lives does change occur more rapidly than in childhood. Kids undergo an intense metamorphosis that only begins to slow in the later years of their adolescence. Inside those tiny, vulnerable bodies are impressionable minds, rapidly developing anatomical structures, and complex physiological processes. Of these processes, few are more integral to overall health than the development of a strong immune system.

In an effort to avoid sedating you, I will consolidate my microbiology lecture as much as possible. Our environments, regardless of how safe we may perceive them, are constantly trying to kill us. Inside all of us, a microscopic war is being waged every second of every day that we are alive. Our bodies are under constant bombardment by various forces and substances (pathogens) whose goals are to maintain the natural order of life through balancing the scales of life and death.You see, back in the day—and I mean way back in the day—these pathogens, primarily in the form of bacteria and viruses, would often win the battle. Individuals would succumb to their illnesses, and the result was population control as described by Charles Darwin with that whole natural selection theory of his.

Our bodies constantly wage these internal battles with impressive efficiency. The primary defensive weapons in these battles are small proteins known as antibodies. Antibodies are created when the body is exposed to a new pathogen, which triggers an immune system response where white blood cells emerge to destroy the pathogen. The immune system then creates an antibody for when it has to face that same pathogen again in the future. This tactic is a staple to all forms of warfare. As the great Chinese general Sun Tzu noted in his book, The Art of War, over twenty-five hundred years ago, using the conquered foe to augment one’s own strength.

In some instances, waging war with a virus can result in near-lifetime protection, or immunity, from a particular virus. An example is the rhinovirus, one of hundreds of viruses that makeup the common cold. There are multiple strains of this virus floating around in the sneeze-ridden air we breathe. When you contract one of the strains, you can develop lifelong immunity to that strain. After you have contracted several strains over time, the severity of each illness is lessened. You may be thinking that this doesn’t sound right, but when you do the math it all makes sense. A child in a daycare setting with more than 10 other children will typically contract 10 to 15 colds per year. After a couple of years of life, the child has developed a significant amount of immunity. As the child gets older, the actual colds become less frequent and the symptoms less severe when the virus breaks through the defenses and infects the host.

Let’s say you decide not to send your child to daycare or preschool in an attempt to prevent them from getting sick. Sure, they will have fewer colds and illnesses as infants and toddlers, but what happens when they enter real school and get their first real exposure to germs? The result will be more days absent from the very important kindergarten and first grade, where their educational foundations are built. Of course there’s nothing wrong with choosing not to send your kids to a daycare; you’ll save a ton of money and will probably spare them a few bite wounds from their cannibalistic classmates. Just make sure you keep them social and take every opportunity to allow them to interact with other children, be they family members or new friends at the local playground. Remember, they need to encounter those germs early to build those stronger immune systems. Allow them to interact and discover their environment; the germs will do what they do.

I once had someone tell me that you should feed your children dirt to make them stronger. I swear that is a true story, and I do not agree with that . . . per say. Should children be fed soil? No! Should they be allowed to play outside, get dirty, and have a blast in this new world? You bet your sweet mud pie they should! Try to avoid becoming one of these worrywart parents who treat their children like they are made of glass. Let kids be kids, and they will become stronger as a result.

If you are presently expecting a child, or plan on having a child, the best initial step for the development of antibodies is to breastfeed your baby. (That is for the moms, not the dads!) When your child is born, he or she will come into the world with a decent amount of antibodies that were received from mommy in utero. Your decision to breastfeed will deliver more of your antibodies to your baby through the breast milk and will also extend the life of the antibodies received in the womb. If you breastfeed, keep in mind that antibodies aren’t the only things that cross the barrier from your body to your baby’s body via breast milk. A lot of the bad stuff you ingest can also be transferred to your baby— like alcohol and certain drugs.

Recently, I was in an ER and learned of an infant who had died. It was initially thought to be a SIDS case, but it was later discovered that the infant had died from a heart attack secondary to a cocaine overdose. The mother was a crack cocaine addict who decided to breastfeed her baby after getting high. That was the most tragic example I could think of in regard to toxin exchange via breast milk. If you are taking medication, check with your doctor or pharmacist to see if it is OK for you to breastfeed.

Infection Control

Let’s take a moment and discuss the chic world of anti-germ products that are on the shelves. Should you buy antibacterial hand soap? There are some who say you get the same germ-killing effect from hot water and regular soap as you do from the antibacterial stuff. I’ve used antibacterial hand soap for years at home and, even though it may be a slight waste of money, I opt to go with the it’s-better-to-be-safe-than-sorry approach. One hospital where I worked chose to get rid of the medicated soap and switch to regular liquid hand soap. I didn’t get any sicker after that change was made, but I am pretty anal about frequent hand washing. I also frequently used the hand sanitizer that the hospital opted not to get rid of.

When it comes to hand washing, it’s all about learning to do it the correct way from the beginning. It is such an important factor in preventing illness that the Centers for Disease Control cites the value of proper hand washing as a do-it-yourself vaccine for you and your child. To do it correctly, follow five steps: wet, lather, scrub, rinse, and dry.

Wet the hands with warm water. Lather the hands with soap. Vigorously scrub your hands for at least 20 seconds, paying extra attention to the areas between the fingers, the back of the hands, and under the fingernails. Rinse the hands and then either dry with a clean towel or allow them to air-dry. Typically you should scrub long enough for you to recite the alphabet song in your head—preferably silently, unless you are washing a child’s hands. Then you have the perfect opportunity to teach your child the alphabet while working on your singing voice and vibrato at the same time. Remember, no matter how bad of a singer you may be, your child loves your voice. Of course, as your child gets older, this opinion is subject to change.

Adults should wash their hands at least once an hour and immediately after performing any dirty task like preparing food, using the restroom, or changing a diaper. With your kids, have them wash their hands randomly throughout the day, especially after they play outside. No need to become obsessive compulsive about this; just try to clean those digits a few times throughout the day and create a routine of regular hand washing. The same principles apply to using sanitizing hand gel, although the gel should never be considered an alternative to hand washing. It is more of a bridge device that buys you time between hand washings. With children, it is all about instilling habits early in their lives.

When it comes to disinfecting your child’s environment, there are a ton of aerosol and spray products available for purchase. Money-saving tip: Generics are just as good as the comparable name brand! The cheapest solution is to mix one part bleach with one part water in a spray bottle. Just be sure to keep the bottle labeled and secure from children. Bleach has several unwanted effects like bleaching colors and a bad smell. Most importantly, bleach can be toxic when ingested, so if you use this solution you need to treat it as it is poisonous. However, for germ killing, bleach is the top dog—followed closely by isopropyl alcohol, or rubbing alcohol. When it comes to cleaning toys on a budget, I’d recommend using rubbing alcohol. It dries faster via evaporation and won’t leave the bad taste and residual chemicals that sprays and bleach are likely to leave. To use the alcohol as a disinfectant, fill your labeled spray bottle with the alcohol and don’t cut it with water. Isopropyl alcohol is also toxic when ingested, as is practically any cleaning solution you will use. Regardless of your choice, make sure that your cleaners are properly labeled and, most importantly, secured away from a curious, or thirsty, child’s ability to get their hands on them.

A final aspect of illness prevention that is often overlooked is nutrition. As I mentioned before, the human body is an amazingly complex machine. For it to perform optimally, it is dependent on an active lifestyle, proper hydration, and an optimal intake of nutrients.  I discuss nutrition more in depth in upcoming chapters because it is an often overlooked aspect of medicine. Did you know that most doctors spend very little, if any, of their training on the science of nutrition?

The eating habits and dietary choices we make as adults are often a direct result of the habits that we develop as kids. As you’re probably aware, there is a growing problem with childhood obesity. Two main