Good Intentions

More doctor crap, but not about me this time:

So a few days ago I took Addy in for her four year check up. Usually a trip to the pediatrician leaves me sweaty and frantic and ready to look up the laws re: child abandonment in our state, but this time, despite the hour and half of waiting, I managed to stay calm and keep them reasonably entertained and not climbing the walls. (And this without my morning coffee. Perhaps the adrenal booster is working?) They were being well behaved, I was being well behaved: all was well.

And then the dreaded vaccination discussion. Apparently she was due for four separate shots, or maybe it was four vaccinations, but two were combined so it was three shots? Anyways, a LOT of different live viruses being injected all at once. And I wasn't really cool with it, especially since she's still kind of low weight for her age and she's just so pale and FRAGILE looking. She doesn't exactly seem like a hale, robust child who could fight off four different, albeit tiny, doses of serious illnesses and keep on feeling fine while doing so. So I asked if we could stagger the vaccines, and still have her caught up by preschool next year. Not a big deal.

They agreed in the end- I mean, they can't FORCE the needles into her thighs without my permission. But they kept whining about how it's so much EASIER to get it all over with at once, and the younger the better, so that the kid doesn't remember the shots and then hate the doctor and the nurses. And it's so much better when they're smaller so that they're easier to hold down. All I could think was, "This is all stuff for YOUR benefit. Why would I make this decision based on what's going to be easiest for you guys?!"

In the end I let them give her one booster shot, the combined one for polio and pertussis- I've heard about some outbreaks of pertussis (whooping cough) lately and it really sounds awful, so I thought we'd better get on that one. And wouldn't you know, she held perfectly still, didn't require any holding down, nor any convincing that the doctor and nurses weren't evil people bent on stabbing her. She didn't even cry, and she THANKED the nurse before we left! (Bribe her with a Dum-Dum sucker, though, and she'd probably let you break her leg without much fuss.) I felt pretty smug. Totally nixed THAT argument for doing all the shots at once!

But later, at four o' clock the next morning, she was awake, crying and clammy, with a fever of one hundred and four and complaining that her stomach hurt. I was immediately awake, jolted with adrenaline and fear. Her forehead was so hot against my lips, her gaze so vacant. Once tucked into our bed, she said very little in complaint to our repeated attempts to gauge her temperature and administer medicine, which was the strangest thing of all. Not to be melodramatic, but she just looked so pitiful laying there against my pillow, all bright red cheeks against white, white face and glassy eyes.

She was fine by morning; a dose of Tylenol helped her to sleep, her fever broke, and she was back to her old self. It was obviously a result of the vaccination, though, so I can't help still feeling really yucky about it. Good job preventing that vaccine reaction, Mommy! And fevers in the nighttime are always so scary feeling to me. I become Ma Ingalls, huddling over my sick baby with washcloths and a furrowed brow, wondering if this is just a fever, or is it YELLOW FEVER? ARE WE ALL GOING TO DIE?