3.22.2010

wassup, shotty?

we started judah's vaccinations on friday. yup, he never had a shot before almost 10 months old. we aren't anti-vaccine or fraidy cats or down-with-the-establishment hippies or anything like that, we just wanted to make sure that we had a peace about what and when we started injecting into our baby. we wanted to have time to do a little bit of research and a lot of praying before deciding the route that felt best for us.
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until now judah has been able to go to preschool because we signed a religious exemption waiver rather than bringing in his vaccination records. you don't have to say what your religious reasons are for waiving vaccines, but for your edification, ours were that god gave us this tiny perfect little human and trusted us to do our best with him while we have him and a big part of that for us was wanting to feel at ease about his vaccine schedule before starting one. whatever, 99.9% of people have no issues with this and do it just like the doctors recommend and their kids turn out fine. jesse and i did. i'm sure judah would have too.
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maybe we fell into the fear-mongering trap of some (now proven bogus) studies said that vaccines cause autism. or the freak one in a million allergic reaction that some kids have to certain shots. maybe we were freaked out about instances of mercury and other sketchy preservatives that are used in some vaccines. perhaps we were uneasy about him getting shots into his bloodstream before his blood/brain barrier was 100% formed. we were certainly nervous about the fact that a tiny newborn gets the same dose of vaccine as an adult would. whatever our reasons for feeling unsettled, there is TONS of info out there that is screaming that vaccines are the worst thing in the world and just as much screaming that they are the best thing in the world. it's pretty overwhelming and confusing, but we finally got to a place somewhere in the middle and came up with a schedule and selection of shots that we feel really good about.
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i am FAR from a medical expert and i have done much less vaccination research than a lot of moms i know, but for us we felt like when it involves injecting things into our baby, we'd like to get all of our questions out of the way BEFORE hand. this is such a crazy and controversial subject because it involves us as parents making decisions about our babies that could harm them either way. people get incredibly riled up and take things very personally while defending their decision and/or reviling the other side. in the end if judah gets measles because we didn't vaccinate him OR if he has a horrible neurological reaction that is 100% proven to have been cause by the vaccine, we are not going to get arrested for being crappy parents and we are still going to be the ones loving him and taking care of him through everything. so yeah, we love modern medicine and we love our baby. we hate the drama. end of story.
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technically, beginning of my real story. sorry for the sidelong rant.

so yeah. i was 100% cool with the vaccines. now the needles in my baby i hadn't really taken the time to think about. so all week i was so scared and having rabid butterflies performing "stomp!" in my stomach every time i thought about us pinning him down so we could inject him. horrible.
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wait, you're taking me to the doctor to do WHAT? no, i think i'll just hold on to these keys.
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it didn't help that we were smack in the middle of his nap time when we went to the appointment so he was already in the 90th percentile for crankiness.

before the toe-prick for the hemoglobin test (he had one heel-stick before when he was a few weeks old to test for jaundice but the old boob made him forget that pain in about 1.3 seconds. now that he's weaned himself, i think whipping it out would be less than comforting and slightly creepy)

judah freaked out when his toe got pricked. it was a horrifying sign of things to come. he bled his band-aid right off and was just so pissed at the world.


bleeding all over daddy and his 2nd band-aid.
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so then he had his checkup. we were pumped to find out he is 50th percentile in weight and 75th in hieght. the doctor even said "long and lean." at least one person in our family should be. but you would have thought the little ear flashlight was a syringe plunging through his eustachian tubes the way he went nuts. he just can't stand being messed with or being restrained. it was sad; even knowing that it didn't hurt one bit and knowing what was coming next.
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assuming the position
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i took his arms and jesse took his legs. right away he started fussing because we were falsely imprisoning him. with my head right down by his i watched the needle go into his chunky little thigh. time stood still. seriously it seemed like it took a year for her to depress the plunger. meanwhile judah went straight from fussing and struggling to tomato-faced silent screaming as we kissed him and tried to calm him. i almost passed out in this moment. right about the time the second shot went in his other leg was when the first tsunami of tears and wailing hit the audible spectrum for the human ear. so loud. then the second needle was out. band-aids on and into our arms.
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as soon as he was off the table and in daddy's (of course) embrace he was fine. he stopped crying and did the pitiful little sniffle with bottom lip out recovery routine while holding a favorite binky and clean urinalysis cup.
jesse is not strangling him.
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he didn't get a fever and he wasn't noticeably sleepier. we were vigilant about rubbing the injection sites and bicycling the legs to avoid soreness. he didn't even cry when i took off the band-aid and some of his little peach fuzz with them (even daddy cries when i do that to him).

no longer in pain, but still dreadfully offended
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all in all it was a very reassuring start to the vaccines for us as parents who had wavered and wondered if we were doing the right thing. he was a trooper and still think i'm gonna be too busy that day to go with jesse and him to the doctor.

4 comments:

  1. yay!! he survived! i knew he'd do fine. it's always worse on the parents...we worry long before the shots, our hearts get ripped out when they get the shots, and then we keep worrying for days afterward, feeling their foreheads every 5 seconds and over-analyzing every blink of the eye, every sniffle, every single move that they make... in the meantime, they are uncomfortable for 1 min. max, and then they forget all about it...it's a hard knock life for us 'rents.
    anyway, welcome to the world of vaccines. glad you're here!!

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  2. Happy to hear that Judah survived... we're currently trying to figure out the vaccination issue because we want to pick our ped based on what we decide (there are lots of hippie drs out here who would shun us for vaccinating...). You're lucky Judah was born in June... people are always hounding us not only about vaccinations, but also about our guy's summer birthday and if we'll start him early or hold him back in school...

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  3. I'm so glad you researched and waited. When I had my first I didn't even know parents had that option, unfortunately, and a lot of parents are naive like I was. My 15 month old has not been vaccinated at all and when he was about 10 months old, we discovered he had multiple severe allergies that could have caused really bad reactions to the vaccines had we gone that route.

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  4. Well, I went straight from laughing uproariously to feeling his (and your) pain. Erin hid under the table when she was old enough (as I did as a child) so it's never fun. So glad you guys did the research, and feel good about your decision. It's a tough one. None of us were thinking about shots when we said, 'Oh boy, we're going to have a baby!'

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