Finally, after 4 1/2 months of trying to get it right with Zach’s medicine (see this post and this post for reference. What a struggle it has been. We started with one pill a night. That didn’t work. Even with waking him up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. He was always wet. And if he was wet when we woke him up, he would change and would still likely be wet when he woke up in the morning. After 6 weeks of that, we upped him to 2 pills a night. This was still hit-or-miss, but mostly miss. In other words, it was only slightly more effective than the previous dose. We gave this a go for about 6 weeks, hoping it would just take some time for the increased dosage to kick in. When it didn’t, we upped it to three pills a night, the highest dose he can take.

We weren’t really sold that the increased dosage would work, since none of the other had. About 3 weeks into the new dose, however, he started to wake up dry. A couple of nights went by and, honestly, I thought it was a fluke. You know, we happened to time it just right with middle-of-the-night bathroom breaks, the time he took his medicine vs the time he went to bed, stuff like that. But when a week went by and he was dry 6 out of the 7 days, I was secretly hoping this was it. Another week week went by and again, 6 out of 7 days dry. I knew this was no coincidence. One night he actually woke himself up and went to the bathroom, which has never happened in the 4 years we’ve been dealing with this. Last week, he was dry 6 out of 7 nights, again.

We had a doctors appointment yesterday and I was so happy to report the good news! We were really ready to throw in the towel. We’re keeping him on this dosage for awhile, then we’ll gradually start weaning him off. The worse case scenario is that that he reverts back to wetting the bed and we have to go back to his current dosage. He’s currently going through a growth spurt, and I can’t know how much of this current turn of events is due to that and how much is due to the meds. Probably it’s more likely a combination of the two. Either way, I’m sure glad we’re on this side of things now!

Family, life, the kids | No Comments »

I don’t know if I’ve talked on here before about Zach’s problem with wetting the bed. It’s a fairly common problem in boys, although most outgrow it by the age of 6. Zach (and Ryan, of course. But he’s been day and night trained since the moment they potty trained almost 4 years ago) will be 8 in April and he still wets the bed. It isn’t an occasional thing, it’s a nightly occurrence. We’ve tried everything short of those bedwetting alarms that look like this (from the bedwettingstore.com):

We didn’t go with that option specifically because of Brian’s work schedule. They are loud and obnoxious and aren’t really conducive to a 2 a.m. wake-up call for him.

So, after trying a myriad of other option, yesterday we started medication. It is supposed to basically stop his body from peeing. It didn’t work last night, but poor Zach had a problem swallowing the pill. Hopefully it’ll be better for him tonight, now that he *sort of* knows what to do (the pill is tiny. smaller than a skittle, even). We are hoping this works for him. We’re giving it two weeks and if it isn’t working, we’ll be increasing his dosage. If that doesn’t work, well, I don’t know what’s left to try. I guess we just hope that he outgrows it sooner rather than later.

Family, the kids | No Comments »