But before we get into schoolin', I have to rant a little bit about the weather here in Utah. It's May 6th, and I have to wear a jacket still. It snowed last week. SNOWED!!! I almost had a stroke when I got up and looked outside and saw snow on the ground. I had been planning to go out and get my car registered that day, but I didn't. It was my way of protesting the weather. Fuck that shit.
OK so, school... I changed my major. Yeah, yeah, I know, I change it like 5 times a semester. But this time, I'm (probably) going to stick with it.
Nursing.
Yes. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
I did this for a few reasons. Namely, there is a nurse shortage, and there has been for years. Which is kinda surprising, because the nursing programs at all of the SLC schools (and probably most of the schools in the country) are full of nursing hopefuls. I think what probably happens is that these people go to nursing school, get their first job at a hospital or whatever, and decide they hate it after a few months, so they quit.
Another reason I moved to nursing is that it's a job I can do anywhere. Jake and I don't have to rock-paper-scissors over where we move for a job.
It will also be handy when we have the baby and Jake inevitably teaches it to do dangerous things. Less hospital visits = good thing.
So I'm in pre-nursing. More specifically, I'm taking a Certified Nurse Assistant (CNA) course at SLCC. Having the NA certification is a requirement for starting the nursing program at SLCC, so I'm going to do it before the baby comes and get it out of the way. It's a self-paced thing, so I can be done in a couple of months easy. Blah blah blah.
Oh, my little seedlings that I talked about in my last posting are now plants... kinda. The cucumbers are doing the best, by far. They're going bananas. The cilantro... not so good. The jalapenos... well, the ones that have lived this long are starting to do better. And the salvia is just gone. They were all doing fine, doing fine, doing fine, DEAD. Overnight DEAD. I blame the snow. All the tomatoes and basil are doing well. I tried to transplant a couple of the oregano and those died, but the ones I left alone are doing great. And the butterfly flower has really taken off.
I can finally feel the Beast kicking me. Most of the time, it's just little flicks and pokes, but once in a while it feels like s/he's going kung-fu ape wild all over the place. When Jake and I went and got the ultrasound, the Beast was wiggling around like crazy, which amused the doctor. It's a really good thing I don't want to know the sex, because the Beast wasn't giving it up that day. I would have been all kinds of bent out of shape had I wanted to know.
Oh... I can't end this blog without a rant at the dumb bitches at acertainbabyforum.com. Someone asked about the link between vaccinations and autism. Everyone pretty much answered that there have been so concrete studies linking the two, saying that the benefits of vaccines outweigh the risks, yadda yadda. OK whatever, I'm not bothered at the point, I'm just reading. Then I read that some chick has posted something along these lines:
It's irresponsible not to vaccinate your children. The fact that parents aren't vaccinating is contributing to more obscure childhood diseases having a re-emegence, such as smallpox and polio.
I had to comment. Fuckin' smallpox and polio?? SMALLPOX??? I did a quick search on the CDC website, to make sure I was getting my facts right, and I reported them to this lady:
Smallpox was declared eradicated in 1979 by the CDC and the WHO (World Health Org., not the band). It's extinct. No one gets vaccinated for it anymore. If you go to your doctor and request the smallpox vaccine for your kids, he's going to look at you like you're some kind of crazy person.
In 2007, there were 1,600 cases of polio WORLDWIDE. The CDC reports that polio currently exists in a wild state (meaning you can catch it from your workplace/school/terrorist training camp) in four countries: Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nigeria. 98% of all polio cases come from these countries, with the other 2% occurring in countries that infected Afghanis/Pakistanis/Indians/Nigerians travel to.
I waited patiently for a response, and I got one. She said she hadn't meant smallpox, she had meant measles (because they're so similar and easily confusable), and she said that ACTUALLY in the UNITED STATES, something called the VDPV (Vaccine-Derived Poliovirus) was being spread because of parents not vaccinating their kids.
I twitched. I actually twitched. Even without looking it up, the very definition of VDPV revolves around those first two letters: Vaccine-Derived. Derived from the vaccine. Coming from the vaccine. Caused by the vaccine.
I Googled it. Apparently, there are two types of polio immunizations: the kind that gets injected to you via needle and syringe, and the kind that involves you swallowing drops of the vaccine. The needle immunization contains dead poliovirus, but the mouth drops are weakened, half-dead but still alive poliovirus. It's kinda like the flu shot we all get. If you get the shot itself, you usually don't get sick. But if you get that goddamn nasal spray (which contains live cultures), you can actually get sick. Do you get the actual flu? No. You get "flu-like symptoms," which won't kill you if you're a normal person. If you have AIDS or something, it might kill you, but most doctors aren't reckless enough to give a live-culture vaccine to immuno-compromised peoples.
So, if you get the mouthdrop polio vaccine as a kid and you have a compromised immune system, you could contract this VDPV. However, VDPV is NOT polio, at least not the kind we all picture in our heads (with the crippling and the wheelchairs). It can be cured very easily by a supplemental vaccine once diagnosed.
According to the website polioeradication.org, between 1997 and 2007, there were less than 200 cases of VDPV in the world, none of which were in the US.
According to the CDC, an immuno-compromised infant in Minnesota was found to have had VDPV in 2005. They reported that it probably caught the virus from someone outside of the United States, since the USA hasn't used the mouthdrop vaccine since 2000.
Either way, I consider ONE case of not-even-for-realsies-polio in an immuno-compromised baby hardly an outbreak due to parents not vaccinating. The moral of the story is, this girl is a fuckin' moron.
No comments:
Post a Comment
I <3 Comments