4 month check-up

aislinn had her four-month check-up yesterday.  as a reminder, at her 2-month check-up her stats were as follows:

head circumference: 10%*

weight: 30%

height/length: 30%

now her stats are as follows:

head circumference: 25%

weight: 30%

height/length: 60%

she is getting long!  and she weighed 12lbs, 10oz.

she also got her second round of vaccinations.  all was going pretty well afterward--we came home and she nursed and played and napped, but then she woke up around 7:00 p.m. SCREAMING.  she took a bit of a bottle from jake and then screamed hysterically for another hour.  wouldn't nurse, wouldn't take a bottle or a pacifier, i could barely hold her she was so rigid and upset.  her right leg (where she got the pediarix injection) was red and swollen, and i'm sure it hurt.  i put her in a bath and she calmed down a little, but as soon as i took her out she was screaming again. it was awful - she's a sweet, mild-mannered baby, so this was WAY out of the ordinary.  i have never before not been able to calm her.

finally i broke down and called the pediatrician.  our pediatrician rocks, btw, and returns calls personally until 9:00 p.m.  i love him.  he told me everything i already knew, but i needed to hear it from someone with a D.O. a the end of their name, not a J.D.  by the time i got off the phone with the doc, jake had calmed her down and she was sleeping in his arms, dancing around in the dark bedroom.  i took her to bed with me and she was up and down until about midnight, fussy and restless, at which point she passed out and slept until 7:00 a.m.

i have always been on the fence about vaccinations.  i'm sure they work (well, not 100%, but at least some), and i understand herd immunity.  but it scares the hell out of me knowing that i am intentionally exposing my child to dangerous substances, and that she could become a statistic, one of those children who has an "adverse event."  

don't get me wrong--i don't believe in keeping kids in a sterile environment.  kids are made to get dirty, and each childhood cold or fever, while miserable and sometimes scary, is an important building block in their developing immune system.   but that's a separate post.

the first firm i worked at did a lot of "catastrophic" medical malpractice, meaning they took cases where people were $eriously injured, not just your average old slip-and-fall.  i saw a vaccine injury once while i was there, and it stuck with me.  a beautiful, perfect little girl who got her 12-month booster shots and then over the course of the next few weeks lost substantially all of the motor function in her lower body.  they refer to them as "neurological events," and the pharmaceutical companies and the government adamantly contend that they can't be convincingly linked to vaccines.  but then in the very same breath they've set up the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), and the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund which pays hush money to the parents of children who have had catastrophic reactions, while simultaneously shielding the pharmaceutical companies from lawsuits or any type of liability for injuries to children caused by their products.  the Vaccine Injury Compensation Trust Fund, which pays out all that hush money, had a balance of 2.5 billion dollars as of this time last year.  but they say there's no link.  seriously?  that goes beyond the pale.  

i mean, i get the government's outward motivation - the health of the masses, the greater good, herd immunity, prevention of pandemics, eradication of disease.  

and i also get their underlying motivation.  vaccines are products, developed and sold for profit.  products full of aluminum and viruses and other substances known to be toxic that were injected into aislinn's tiny little twelve-pound body yesterday after i signed consent forms acknowledging that the benefits outweigh the risks.

but do they?  i'm not convinced.

when my dad was a kid, in the pre-vaccine-schedule 1950s, he suffered a series of serious illnesses (the measles and the mumps among them) that, combined, left him deaf in one ear, and also likely caused the tiny, invisible weakness in his heart wall that three decades later led to his sudden death at the age of thirty eight.  if vaccinations had been available to him, this might have been prevented.

and as my pediatrician noted, "what is the first serious illness that you actually remember from your childhood?"  for most people, it's the chicken pox.  and now the varicella vaccine can prevent my child from having that same memory.

we all want to protect our children, but vaccines are not without risks--yet an overwhelming majority of parents consent to them, blissfully unaware or intentionally uninformed, without blinking an eye or asking a question.  and it's true that the vast majority of children do just fine. 

but i feel that along with the knowledge that i have comes the obligation to ask myself, which is more dangerous?  that my child might suffer a life-threatening illness and i'd have to live with the knowledge that her exposure risk was heightened because i chose not to vaccinate?  or that my child might suffer a life-threatening illness because i intentionally had her exposed?

yesterday when the nurse brought those shots in and laid them on the exam table next to aislinn, my eyes welled up as i looked at them, and it was all i could do to not stop her.  i had said to the doctor, "tell me i am doing the right thing."  he assured me that i was, but all i could think about was that little girl who couldn't walk anymore.  i was consumed with fear that the same might happen to aislinn, right there before my very eyes, as i watched syringe after syringe being stuck into her thigh.

and the sound of aislinn screaming last night has further shaken my obviously tenuous faith in the safety of these shots.  i have a lot of thinking to do in the next two months before she gets her next round of vaccinations at six months - including her first MMR vaccine (measles, mumps and rubella - the vaccine most publicly discussed for its potential link to autism).

it is a terrifying choice to have to make - and not one that should be taken lightly by anyone.

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*these are her "percentiles," meaning that if she's in the 30th percentile for weight, then 30% of babies are lighter than her, and 70% of babies are heavier than her.