adhdbisexualramblings asked:
So, simply for writing and reference purposes, let’s say a 5 month old drinks a sip of alcohol (perhaps whiskey). How long would it take for the child to react and what would be the hospital‘s procedure for caring for them? I swear this is only for writing please don’t think I’m a murderer
While intentionally giving an infant alcohol (or really any other sedating drug) outside of a closely supervised medical setting can be very dangerous, a 5-month-old taking a single sip of even high-proof alcohol by accident likely isn’t going to cause harm.
The 2 big differences between an adult and a 5-month-old in terms of how they process alcohol include how quickly the alcohol takes effect and how long it would take for the infant to metabolize the alcohol out of their system.
Infants’ stomachs don’t empty as predictably as adults’ do. Stomach emptying is occasionally randomly prolonged or expedited in an infant. This means that unlike in adults, when onset of alcohol effects can be reliably seen 5-10 mins after ingestion, in infants that would be a lot less predictable (why a baby can throw up a whole stomachful of partially digested milk an hour after feeding). So basically how long it would take for a the infant to react could be totally and completely random.
At 5 months, humans have less than a 10th of the ADH (an enzyme needed to break down alcohol) of an adult, meaning it would likely take them a lot longer to break down the alcohol and they’d feel the effects of it longer than an adult would.
A sip of whiskey isn’t likely to be enough to cause someone to take their child to the emergency room. They may want to call poison control and discuss any symptoms their child is having or just to be reassured, but generally the kid is probably just going to feel a little weird and then sleep it off. And they’re probably not going to accidentally drink more than a sip because it tastes really bad to a kid who really has only had formula or breast milk up to this point.
All they’d really want to do is check on them frequently, make sure they were on their back in a crib without pillows, stuffed animals, or blankets (which they should be anyway), and be more careful about where they leave their drinks in the future.