For the last two days my two year old daughter, Anya, the younger one, has been ill. She’s had high fever and has been crying a lot pointing to her mouth. Since its time for her molars to come out, we assumed that it was just that. Many times babies get fever when they are teething accompanied by upset stomach and excessive drooling. We checked her mouth regularly for any telltale signs like swollen gums where the tooth would eventually rip out from but didn’t find anything. Swati usually checks for these by putting her finger in the baby’s mouth and feeling for enlarged gums and maybe the tip of a tooth breaking through the skin.
Then when she refused to eat anything and kept complaining that her mouth was paining, I checked the inside of her mouth with a flashlight. That’s when we came to know that she’s got sores at the back of her throat. That is why she couldn’t swallow anything. Poor baby. She didn’t know how to explain it so she kept pointing to her mouth. In India the generally accepted reason for this is ‘buildup of heat’. Its hard to explain what that means to someone who doesn’t live here because it doesn’t have anything to do with temperature. Even the doctors use that term for their diagnosis.
There is supposed to be a balance of elements in the body. When everything is balanced, the body is healthy. Sometimes because of poor eating habits like eating spicy foods or eating at irregular times, this balance is thrown out of whack. If it shifts to the ‘cool’ side, people get flu or colds and when it shifts to the ‘hot’ side we get acidity and ulcers in the mouth. But it is not the temperature that is shifting, it is the overall energy of the body. The body can shift to the ‘cool’ side even during a heat stroke as well and generally everyone recognizes it pretty quickly because of the symptoms.
So we took her to the doctor. For babies many people prefer to go to a homoeopathic doctor instead of a practitioner of the regular stream of medicine because homoeopathy is supposed to be milder and subtle as opposed to the broad spectrum antibiotic treatment of the allopathic stream. While I took the baby to the doctor, Swati called up all the friends and relatives with kids and asked them if their children ever had the same problem and what they did to alleviate it.
The doctor gave the usual small white pills. That was yesterday evening. Till today evening, we hadn’t seen any improvement so we decided to shift the stream to allopathic medicine because she was not able eat much of anything since yesterday. Modern medicine recommends vitamin-b for ulcers in the mouth and that’s all the doctor said to give her in terms of medicine. It seems to be some kind of a reaction to something she must have eaten but we can’t figure out what it is. At her age most everything eventually finds its way to her mouth and that means it could have been almost anything.
Right now she is sitting in my lap listening to music. She can’t seem to fall asleep probably because of pain. Its promising to be a long night. I’m praying that she’ll start getting better soon since its too much for someone so small.
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