Discombobulation (Compliments of Vaccination)

Vaccinations suck.  It’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t, world out there for Moms, I tell you, and vaccinations are one of the many horrors we have to face.  On the one hand, we have the CDC and all their friends telling us that if you don’t let them stick a mercury-laced cocktail of microscopic brew in your two-month-olds thigh, your baby might/will get sick and die.  Then you have the anti-vaccine crowd telling you that if you do put that cocktail in your baby’s thigh, your baby might/will die (or get autism, brain-damaged, or any number of other nightmarish outcomes).  

As if that’s not confusing enough, I get to top that off with a real-life friend who claims her boys were totally fine until they got vaccinated and then began exhibiting signs of brain-damage (no joke), MIXED with my mother, a person in the health care profession who actually GIVES OUT the vaccinations herself and sometimes has a batch at home in her fridge.  Yes, this is a slice into my mad mad world. 

The long and the short of it is, I’m lazy.  Hey, I homeschool.  So, like, vaccinations?  Who cares?  Why vaccinate when I don’t have to anyway, I say.  I’ve read all the books and watched all the movies from both sides, and I swear I can’t tell who’s lying and who’s full of the truth, or even worse, how the two sides are both telling the truth and lying, so I’ve sort of claimed the excuse of, “Oops.  I keep forgetting,” and have only vaccinated every so often. 

I’d brag now about how my kids have always been so healthy so that my lazy vaccine policy has been a good thing, but, I can’t, because about four years ago, they all actually aquired a vaccine-preventable (though how preventable is up for debate) illness.  I got to experience what it felt like to be a mother of children with whooping cough and it was a visual demonstration of how much more grateful I’d be for vaccinations if the diseases in question were still around in high numbers. 

My oldest child, then six, who’d been vaccinated four times for pertussis (whooping cough), had it the worst out of the whole group.  I have hazy memories of sitting by her bed hoping she’d stop coughing eventually, long enough to at least catch a breath.  Then I understood how a child could die simply from coughing too much.  It was two weeks of terror.  

I started getting more up to date with vaccines after that, though selectively and, well, still lazily.  I mean, why bother with MMR just yet—no one has measles in our neck of the woods, you know?  My motto was, “I’ll get to it, I’ll get to it…”  But now the kids are going to school.  I have to go buy backpacks, lunch boxes, and catch up on vaccinations.  The first two are way more fun.

So, off to the public health center we went today, five little ducklings all in a row, dreadfully behind in all the required shots but generally clueless about what was about to befall their trusting little souls.  Don’t get me wrong—I had them all prepped and everything, you know, like answering their wide-eyed questions with stuff like, “Oh, it hardly hurts at all.  Feels like a pinch.”  

“Like this, Mom?”   Anna gives me a big pinch and I try not to show that, dang it, that hurt. 

“Yup, like that.  See?  You’ll do great.”  I smile big.  And I really mean it.  And they troop into the public health center in their usual animated way, not worried at all, or, if they were, doing a great job of hiding it.   

After hanging out in the waiting room—a waiting room that was really cool for the first half-hour what with all the neat toys and the box with those wires and balls attached to the top of it and books and a little table and chairs, a waiting room that started getting a little tiresome the second half-hour as the sound of the fire truck siren button on the Bob the Builder book started wearing thin, as in really thin, and the little table began to be mistaken for a diving platform, a waiting room that was completely in chaos by the third half hour when the boys decided to start acting like boys and joyfully attempting full body slams on each other in the middle of the entry way area (whereupon I wished to God I’d remembered to stop by the coffee drive-thru down the street and ordered an extra-tall mocha), they called our name.  

Our name. 

All five kids magically stopped what they were doing, closed their mouths, peeled themselves off the carpet and sat quietly in a row, looking at the nurse and appearing, for all practical purposes, almost like children in a museum, excited about what they were going to discover down the mysterious hallway. 

My oldest went down that dark blue hallway first, her hand in mine and her resolve to be cool, calm, and collected slowly dissolving as we followed the kind nurse ahead of us.  Walking into the exam room, she saw the table, the table with a line up of shots sitting on a clean white cloth.   Resolve finalized it’s complete dissolution.  When the screaming began, I ended up having to try out some of the earlier demonstrated wrestling holds I’d learned about in the waiting area. 

Less than one minute (and five needle sticks) later, she was done.  I wished they had a back door exit, so I could have shuffled her straight out to the car.  Because let’s just say that having Judah walk out of that hallway as a quivering mass of tears was not good for group morale.  The once eager faces were now no longer raising their hands in the air begging to be selected next.  And so the drama would play itself out.  A walk down the hallway, a collapse into panicked terror, and me learning about the many ways to pin down arms and legs.  In fact, by the time it was the last kid’s turn, I was trying out more than just wrestling moves. 

If I had it to do over again, I’d have gone strongest to weakest, but as it turned out, Emmanuel was last, the child who could grow up to be an Olympic athlete (if he had parents who could invest in that kind of training.  Sorry, son).  I’m talking natural born muscles, grit, and the brains to put both to use.  Prying his hands off the waiting room couch was complicated enough, but I forgot to think about the grip factor of the door frame on the way into the hallway.  He didn’t.  

Five McDonald’s icecream cones later,  I think everybody’s forgiven me.  At least mostly.