Mama PlaygroundA Blog for Moms

The only thing that keeps you moving forward through the vaccinations is the belief that it is all for the good of the baby. You watch while some stranger with a robotic lack of sensitivity to the feeling of your child injects needles in to a sweet and plump little thigh. Sometimes you are even recruited to hold the baby’s arms down! Eck. It makes me want to vomit to be part of it.

Our entire generation of new parents has a looming shadow of doubt cast over the wisdom and security of the vaccinations. We are not longer sure that we are doing the right thing by allowing the mysterious chemicals to be forced in to our babies’ blood streams. With that sense of “doing the right thing” taken away the shots at the doctor’s office becomes an unbearably painful thing for us parents. We don’t even know if the pain is for the child’s own good, or if our child will become a part of the new autism statistics.

For her one year shots I took my daughter to the doctor and decided to go ahead with the shots. We also allowed Hep B shots, which we did not allow at her birth or anytime shortly thereafter. We decided it was ok to catch up now because she is visiting more public places and I have paranoid visions of her touching some needle somewhere on accident. Anyways, it made me miserable to give her the shots, but she is older and stronger now and I had faith that I was doing the right thing. Wrong.

That night as she got fussy, I figured that fussiness was shortlived and it would go away. She tripped and fell that evening without really putting her arms out in front of her like usual though, and ended up bumping her head on the concrete. Ok, now flags are starting to go up. She showed no signs of concussion though, and didn’t even cry for very long. I chased her around with an ice pack for her forehead and watched for changes in pupil dilation or any signs of injury. She ate dinner and got ready for bed at the usual time.

Flash forward 24 hours. She is mostly normal, well mostly. That next night though, she had a terrible night sleep. It was fitful and interupted, compared to her normal sleeping through the night routine. When she woke up she was fussy, and tired but we thought it was because of her poor night’s sleep. It got worse though. She became so lethargic that it was difficult to watch. She wouldn’t nap like normal but she wandered around the house with sick eyes looking dazed and resting her head on everything. She rested on the ground, my lap, the foot stool. She lost her appetite and wouldn’t drink. A fever was evident now. It got up to 101.5 but the doctor wasn’t calling us back.

Another terrible, terrible night of trying to keep her temperature down with tylenol and every cooling technique the internet could provide. She was miserable though. This is how every parent’s story about their now-autistic child begins. I have to wait in fear to find out how our story ends.