I find it strange that they would not script you suspension Toni.  Ashley is 11 yo now and we lived in Preston, Lancashire in the UK for the first two years and the local pharmacy was always faxed the script from the hospital direct whenever there was a dose change.   If anything, from my understanding, (even when I asked for tablets to travel my sons Doctor was averse to it) we had to have suspension for him at the time because the doses they do in tablets there were simply too large to dose a small baby with.  I.e. if your child was only meant to be on 1.5 - 2 mg’s x2 to x3 times per day, this couldn’t be achieved with the smallest 10mg pill that they have there.  We had those when we came out here--- at the time being oval shaped, not round. I mean here they do have 5 mg pills easily split down to 1.25 mg with a pill splitter.  But at that time there they didn’t have 5mg pills at all, if they do at all now.  I came over here with 10mg pills to be split and each half dosed every 12 hours literally.

There could not have been any law within the UK at that time, either that or my pharmacist was doing something illegal--lol!  Not when we were on the pharmacy made medicine anyway, and if there is now then I personally feel that it is well and truly over the top really, because it was the mass produced suspension that was found to be faulty, not suspension made by pharmacists.  that’s another story....

I had Ashley on the pharmacy made the med’s and he delivered all three bottles to us every Wednesday night after he closed his shop. Without fail--he never missed it.  I was very impressed with him actually.  We never had a problem with the med’s, and they were always made up in the same way, same time, same day.  We were to some degree tied to the hous at that time every week, but to me it was great because there was never an occasion where I would forget to collect the meds doing it that way, or dropping them and damaging the glas bottles on the way home (I did not drive back then). 

He even colored the florinef pale pink for us so that we would know which was which immediately in the syringes.  Fantastic guy.  I don’t believe the pharmacy is there anymore.  It wasn’t one of your up market large chain store pharmacies like Boots chemist, infact it was Foots (lol) pharmacist in Preston and he was an oldish guy in his late fifties.  Made everything up himself--very tiny little pharmacy.  reminded me of the old type pharmacies you see occasionally.  He was a pleasure to deal with.  Never complained about having to make the medicines--in fact he was more on the ball than I.  If he was going to be late delivering he would ring me and tell me so.  Extremely considerate.  He treated us very respectfully--and if ever I had any concerns, he would ring the hospital and get a script faxed through for extra meds if we needed extra on top of what he had already made up---i.e. when they are sick.  I don’t know what I would have done without the guy really because I needed things to be simple and for someone else to be efficient like that at the time because inside I was going to pieces in the first few months really.

Even Ashley Doctor at the hospital always referred to him as "This amazing young man," when he spoke to student Doctors or nurses in our presence.  They were all great, I we were extremely spoiled and all. 

I posted Ashleys chart because it clearly shows that at birth his growth was accelerated and that even after several dose raises it slowed and was just picking up at aged 6 months before we changed to putting his meds in his bottle.  You’ll see that it did at that point catch up with a nice spurt, and then the minute we changed, it slowed again.  This was basically like giving him a dose raise in effect because as I said he began to take all the meds for the first time since birth--instead of spitting the odd unknown quantity up (Ashleys Doctor had told us to ignore or not worry about spit ups because he had adjusted the dose to compensate for spit ups), and this of course meant that he was getting everything then---inclusive of the amounts he would spit up in the past.  So as a consequence after 6 months you see his growth slow very notably on that chart after aged 6 months--and that’s without a scripted dose raise and due to merely the way we chose to dose him from aged 6 months. 

I mean it did not improve for quite some time after that.  The next dose raise was infact just before we came to New Zealand.  At the time he was on less than 5mg twice per day, and in order to switch him to tablets he had to be on atleast 5mg dose.  So they upped the dose at that point a month before we travelled and we used tablets instead to have a trial run.  The bone age done before we came to New Zealand read that he was 6 mths immature in bone growth.  So he had gone from 3 mths immature at 1 yr to 6 mths immature at 2 yrs and as it was becoming a trend at that point his Doctor wrote over a letter to the Doctor here in new Zealand expressing his concerns about the delay in bone growth.  However, they did not really do anything here about that letter.   I only got to read that letter last year when I asked the hospital to photocopy everything they had on record and send it to me. 

Since then I can literally see everything done and why his growth was quite poor.  Even blood tests results.  Most of it quite unnecessary, but done now.