It's Gonna Be a Fun Evening

Yesterday, I started feeling icky. Headache, sore throat... you know, classic you need to get more sleep signs.  What began as a simple headache escalated last night into fever and body aches. I couldn't sleep so I spent most of the night staring at the ceiling and dreading today's visit to the pediatrician.

Not that the pediatrician isn't a nice guy. He is. Very nice. But he serves a purpose today that, while important, is probably the worst part of being the parent of an infant.

Shots.

Stinker gets her first shot today. I say shot, singular, because she's only getting one at a time. Probably the second of her Hep B series (she got the first one at the hospital), but I'm not really sure. I want her to get the shots first for the stuff she's actually likely  to encounter, like measles and whooping cough, rather than the ones she'll probably never come up against, like polio.

I don't want to vaccinate at all, but Jake wants to. I was never vaccinated as a kid, and I was never sick. Like, literally, never sick. I got the chicken pox and that was about it. I'm a big weenie now about being sick because I never was as a kid.

I read a lot of articles regarding the vaccine debate, and all it does is make me worry more.

Will Camille have an allergic reaction to the shot?

Will Camille develop long-term problem because of the shot?

If I don't vaccinate, will Camille die from some disease that's preventable with a shot?

There are traditionally two camps to the vaccination debate: pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine. More commonly though, people are falling into a third camp: pro-some-but-not-all-at-once. That's where I fall. I don't want Stinker to get polio, but I also don't want her to get autism (if indeed shots even cause autism, which they may or may not).

I read this article and many of the comments, and it reinforced what I already thought.

No more time to dwell on this. The time has come. I'm about to go antagonize a doctor will my hysterical-emotional-momma diatribe about how vaccines are purely the machinations of corporate pharmaceutical America trying to squeeze more money out of the ignorant public.