BEG Spray

Or more like "Miracle Spray". Hopkinton Drug is a compounding pharmacy - the old fashioned type of pharmacy that still makes a lot of their products there on the premises. The pharmacist - Dennis Katz - has come up with a lot of his own creations, some of them traditional medicine and some of them alternative type products. I was talking with him one day about Jack and kind of picking his brain to see if he might have something that would help us. And he mentioned this BEG spray. It has two antibiotics in it - Bactroban and Gentimycin, and an ingredient called EDTA which is some sort of chelating agent that pulls the junk out of the sinuses and, as Dennis says, gets rid of the biofilm. Anyway, I wasn't sure about using it for Jack since it's not FDA approved. The ingredients in it are all FDA approved, but the combination of the ingredients isn't. So I talked with our wonderful pediatrician about all of this and she went to work to figure out if this would be okay for Jack. She talked with our ENT at the time in Boston and also talked at length with Dennis. Our ENT said it would be fine and our pedi found out from her discussions with Dennis that in fact this spray had been through a trial of about 1000 people, so that all made me feel better about using it. But I was still on the fence. I'm SUPER cautious about using medications with either of my boys - I'd rather not use medicine if we have a choice because I feel like the body is able to do a lot to fix itself if we don't get in there and muck things up with a lot of chemicals. But sometimes you just don't have that choice, and this was one of those times.

Jack had been having lots of colds back to back - four in total. With the last one he ended up with an ear infection that burst through his eardrum. He was on antibiotics for that and just getting over the cold when he woke up with thick green junk coming out of his nose. I wasn't sure if this was a sinus infection or another cold starting, but I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to try out our new BEG spray. We gave him 3 squirts in each nostril that day and the next day his drainage was much reduced and just a little yellowish. We continued with the spray and the following day the drainage was clear, and by the next day it was gone! Hallelujah! After weeks and weeks of a constant runny nose, Jack was finally flem-free! He started eating better and very quickly started sleeping better. This was an unexpected side effect of the spray. We were hoping it might help him with his seemingly never-ending colds that were apparently turning into sinus infections each time. But suddenly he started sleeping through the night with nary a beep from his pulse oximeter. Jack has had sleep apnea on and off since about the time he turned one. Some nights his pulse-ox only alarms 4 or 5 times, but when he's congested it can go off every 15 minutes. And his sats can drop to dangerous levels - into the 50's and 60's (normal is between 95 and 100%). This only happens for moments at a time, since we wake up as soon as the pulse oximeter alarms. We usually squirt some saline in his nose and reposition him until we find something that works. But for the last 2 months, since we started using the BEG spray, his sleep apnea seems to have completely resolved! We've consulted with no less than 6 different ENT's and had Jack's tonsils and part of his adenoids removed all in an effort to resolve his sleep apnea...who knew that all along the answer was this spray! The first night that we all slept through the night Dan and I woke up around 4 AM marveling that Jack's pulse ox hadn't dinged off all night. But then we couldn't go back to sleep - I guess we were so used to not getting much sleep that our bodies just decided that was it for the night. That happened for a few more nights, but you can be sure that we quickly got used to sleeping again! Oh, what a glorious thing it is to get a good night's sleep!

Anyway, that's our story about our awesome new BEG spray. Stay tuned for more updates while we're in Philly - I hope to be able to connect to the internet at CHOP and post while we're there.