Everything is okay.

[rivka]

The milestone every parent looks forward to: first call to Poison Control.

"Ow, my lip hurts!" Alex said suddenly.

"Let me see... did you bite it?"

"No, I bited the pump," i.e., the hand sanitizer. 62% ethyl alcohol, harmful if swallowed, contact poison control immediately.

"What were you doing biting the pump?"

"I wanted to taste it, but it's yucky."

"How much did you eat?"

"Just a little bit."

I didn't think it could do any harm, but I called just in case. Poison Control seemed to detect a note of disgusted embarrassment, rather than panic, in my voice, and led me through a series of demographic questions before telling me to give her a glass of milk and she'd be fine.

She decided to taste the hand sanitizer. What the hell?

Comments

[post-ecdysis.livejournal.com]

Mr. Yuk has let us down.

[fairoriana.livejournal.com]

It's a good thing I never connected eating all the Flintstone vitamins I could get my hands on and later getting some very nifty bright green yuck stickers!

[kcobweb.livejournal.com]

...Because it's *there*. :)

[fairoriana.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm glad it was such an innocuous call to poison control?

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

It's a gel. Some gels are yummy. Some gels aren't.

. . . weird. It's actually not that bad. I was expecting it to taste like rubbing alcohol, but it's sweeter. You can really taste the perfume in it, though. I guess the sweetness comes from the glycerine. You can taste the acetate, though.

In some ways, I can taste a bizzare similarity to an Aviation Cocktail.

What? I was curious.

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

Perhaps I should skip your next mad scientist party.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I never feed poisonous things to anyone else but myself.

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

Maybe you could add some gelatine (or Kosher equivalent) to an Aviation and...

... on second thoughts, no.

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

deyo's mom once got a talking to when she brought him into the ER after he drank a bottle of something he shouldn't have. They said, "Don't you know you should keep toxic substances locked up?" She looked at them with exasperation: "Shampoo?"

My niece once ate the equivalent of three large bars of glycerin soap. My sister called poison control. They suggested the go to the store and buy a couple of big boxes of disposable diapers, and sit down and wait.

Kids are a bit silly that way. :)

[chargirlgenius.livejournal.com]

Locked up? Ha! My 2.5 year old can unlock doors from the wrong side...

I'm glad Alex is ok. I've heard of other kids eating sanitizer, but I can't remember where, now.

[kate_nepveu]

You have very good choices in post subject lines.

[jazzfish]

And also in relevant userpics.

[ailbhe]

*Snort*. I suppose here I'd call NHS Direct. I'm glad she didn't like the taste though. I knew a girl who used to steal permanent markers and sniff them. Because she liked the smell. It made her pretty sick...

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I suppose here I'd call NHS Direct.

For anything else that wasn't "call an ambulance," I'd call her doctor's office and ask to speak to an advice nurse. But we have a nationwide network of Poison Control centers who do nothing but that, and they've got all the relevant dosages and decision trees right at their fingertips.

[ailbhe]

NHS Direct use http://www.toxbase.org/ but it's not available to the general public, apparently. I've never really thought about it. Until NHS Direct was invented, here or in Ireland we'd just call the doctor's office or out of hours number and speak to someone on the phone. I expect the information is better now and less likely to lead direct to A&E.

[sistercoyote.livejournal.com]

My sister once drank a half a bottle of perfume. I think my mother's reaction was similar to yours.

[ailsaek.livejournal.com]

Well, thank goodness she can talk and is articulate. I call Poison Control about every six months, and all I can ever say is, "I think he ate it, but I'm not sure, or how much."

[tendyl.livejournal.com]

Welcome to motherhood. *lol* Nori decided a bit ago that hand santizier 'tasted' good and we had to put it all away. Silly, silly little girl. I'm glad poison control is available and that a glass of milk was all Alex needed.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Well, I don't think it tastes good, but it certainly doesn't taste as bad as I expected it to.

[lissamc.livejournal.com]

Does this require a taste test between brands?

[minnaleigh.livejournal.com]

I am not a parent but I was responsible for the first time we called Poison Control for my niece. Did you know that a small child could think that a vial of contact lens solution without a lid is a "tiny, tiny cup for drinking"? She came into the room complaining about the "yucky, yucky juice in Aunt Tat's room". Juice? What juice? Cue panic.

[(Anonymous)]

"The Story of Babar" is essentially too sad because the wicked hunter kills Babar's mother. But the picture of the King of the elephants who turned green and died because he "had eaten a bad mushroom" might be worth making a color copy of.

Glad everything is ok!
Grandma Susan

[submarine-bells.livejournal.com]

When I was around 10 years old I tasted a bottle of cologne, convinced that because it smelled so nice, surely it had to taste nice as well.

It didn't. *pulls face*

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I used to chew the heads off matches. Empiricism is a wide place, when you're small.

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

Mine was half a bottle of Dettol (a strong disinfectant), at about the same age as Alex. No, I've no idea what possessed me. I was whisked to hospital and my stomach pumped, and had to stay in overnight.

I'm glad Alex is okay, and I hope you will be soon too.

[naomikritzer]

Alex made it all the way to age 3 before you had to call Poison Control? You guys are gooooooooooooood.

Molly's first call was a "cookie," i.e., a small bottle of unlabeled wood glue that had come with some long-ago flat-packed furniture item. Poison Control asked me what color the glue was, and then assured me that if it looked like Elmer's, it was as non-toxic as Elmer's.

[juthwara.livejournal.com]

I once found K licking a (thankfully non-toxic) Clorox wipe. I remember last year hearing warnings about hand sanitizers because some children had drunk entire bottles and gotten acute alcohol poisoning. Apparently small children are goats.

I wonder if the scents they put in all of these cleansers is part of the attraction. A lot of the stuff we have smells good enough that you could be fooled into thinking it might taste good, if you had absolutely no common sense.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

How else are you going to know how it tastes?

B

[brooksmoses]

I vaguely remember the time my brother ate several flowers off of the wild mustard plants in the yard, and my mother called Poison Control in a bit of a panic, as she had no idea whether they were safe to eat or not.

They didn't know either, though they didn't think they were poisonous, and ended up having to track down a botanist and call her back a half-hour later. I think his verdict was, "If he hasn't shown any ill effects by now, he'll be fine."

His reasoning: "I wanted to know if they tasted like mustard." (Apparently they did, a little bit.)

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

Well...

If she's doesn't end up crawling through closets, finding a moth ball, figuring "if it looks like one of those mints, it must be one of those mints" and not having learned not to eat things off the floor, and giving it a good chew before discovering that it tastes disgusting, she's one ahead of me.