Vaccinations update
I have stressed and stressed about giving Henry his vaccinations on time. Call it a gut feeling. It's not that I don't think vaccinations are useful, I do. But, I hate that there has been so little research on the long term effects of vaccinations. It's hard to weigh the benefits of vax/no vax without good research. And there are plenty of chronic diseases that are on the increase in our society as we stamp out (well, not entirely) many previously deadly infectious diseases. No one really knows what is behind the increase in childhood asthma or other autoimmune diseases, developmental disabilities, or even diabetes (although that might be just a function of the poor modern diet). Sure, maybe vaccinations aren't the absolute cause, but it could be that kids who have a tendency toward these diseases and then getting the vaccinations increases the likelihood that they will actually develop that disease. No one knows. And that is what scares me. Plus, I'm really not afraid of my kid getting chicken pox. I'd much rather they get the actual chicken pox than a vaccine for it that has not had really good long term studies done. No one is really sure if the vaccine will actually prevent vaccinated adults from getting chicken pox or even shingles, and neither one is any fun in adults.
Margaret is fully vaccinated, and I knew most of this stuff before, but my mama gut told me it would be fine. For Henry I feel differently, possibly because he is a boy and boys are at greater risk for developmental disabilities and I already think of him as a delicate object. I'm either following my instincts or my hormones are playing tricks on me. But, I expect him to be in public schools, and to go to preschool around age 2, so unless I do a "religious" exemption, there's not much way around it. I want to give him some vaccinations for sure, so I don't know how to do a religious exemption for some and not others. Anyway, I decided to do a delayed/selective schedule. So he got Hib, pneumoccocal, and polio at his 3-month checkup (I was still considering my options at 2 months, so we didn't go in). In two weeks he's due for the DTaP, according to the schedule I agreed to with the pedi, and now I'm rethinking it all again. As someone on RMC said, it's all about weighing risks vs. benefits, which we do as parents every single day, but I'm still freaking out.
In other Henry health news, he weighed 12 lbs 15 oz at his 3-month check, which was 45th percentile. I've never had a kid that close to the average! He's obviously not a really chubby kid, but compared to how skinny M was at his age (and now, obviously), he's a chunk. Also, when I asked about his protruding umbilical hernia, which looks garishly huge to us, the ped said, "oh one that small will just close up on its own. If it hasn't , we'll do surgery when he's about 5." Seriously, it does not look small. Here it is about a month ago:
OK, I'm done obsessing for the moment. More later on the cough he developed last week...
posted by Maureen @ 1:00 PM
4 Comments:
Yikes! Hernia! Eek!
I'd never tell you not to listen to your mama gut. (Mine is so much more ... imposing now than it was after baby 1. It's impossible to ignore it.) But as the mom of one of those developmentally disabled boys, I'll say that I am convinced vaccinations played no role in his autism. If I had to do it all over again, knowing he might turn out autistic, I'd get every vaccination on time. (And we're getting every vaccination on time for Cady Gray.) To me, it's all about relative risk. There's mumps in Arkansas -- that's real. There are polio outbreaks elsewhere in the world -- that's real. The connection between vaccines and the increase in childhood disorders -- tenuous, and a matter (if anything) of increased risk for those already susceptible. Weighing the comparative risk, I never hesitated, and I would do it again exactly the same way.
Just one mama's $.02.
To me, it's all about relative risk.
I wholeheartedly agree. For me, that was why I didn't hesitate to get the Hib and polio vaccines, but I delayed the hep B until he's older (i.e. going to preschool). His risk for Hib is high, and although the risk for polio is low, it's a nasty, terrible disease. Hepatitis B is also not a good disease, but as long as I'm not Hep B positive, Henry is highly unlikely to get it until he is sexually active (unless he goes to daycare and gets bitten by a positive kid, hence my timing on getting that one). And chicken pox really isn't that dangerous for most children (adults are a different story). But there are documented side effects for some vaccines that are genuinely scary, even if the risk is really, really low. That's why it's all so complicated and confusing. I believe in the public health benefits of vaccines, and I like that if my child is vaccinated against pertussis, her grandparents are less likely to get it (in fact, I think the vaccine might protect them more than her). But, how do I balance that against unknown risks?
I know there is no actual or proven link between various childhood disorders and vaccines, but the problem is that the research is really slim for studying the long-term consequences of how vaccines affect the human immune system, which is a really amazing operation. I feel like I'm making decisions for my child without knowing what is behind curtain 1.
I also didn't mean to imply that vaccines could be the root of all childhood disorders. Certainly not. But the increase in the prevalence of some of these diseases is scary, and no one knows why it is happening. I guess I just wish that more research was done on stuff we inject into our kids. Some countries delay vaccines until age 2, when the immune system is more mature. I'm actually more worried about Henry developing asthma than autism, since asthma does run in our family, and it can be fatal. But hey, while I'm worrying, I can just add in anything else I think of! ; )
I'm still getting all of the vaccines for Henry, but I'm getting them on a more spread out schedule. It might not make any difference, but it assuages my fears a tiny bit. And I hope you don't think I'm judging you (or anyone else) for doing the recommended schedule. After all, Margaret is fully vaccinated on schedule (well, I did delay her Hep B, too), and when she goes for her next checkup, she'll get her boosters. And when that cervical cancer vaccine gets approved, I'll probably have her get that one too. As parents, we are just doing the best we can, and we make whatever decisions we feel are best for our own kids at the time. There are never any guarantees.
Really, my freakout is probably due solely to Henry's hospital stay for jaundice. Good grief, if he'd ever been in the NICU or been genuinely ill, I might have become a complete basketcase. Clearly I've inherited some of my mom's skill for worry. I know how lucky I've been so far that my kids have been relatively healthy, and I guess I'd like to keep it that way.
Thanks for your input, Donna. I really respect your opinions as a mom (and in lots of areas!), so I appreciate you weighing in.
This comment is longer than the original post, I think. I need an editor.
Oh, and if you're still not convinced that I might be crazy, Henry sleeps on his tummy. Do I worry about SIDS? Of course. Does he sleep pretty well. Yep. *sigh*
I do believe that there have been way too many conclusions drawn before the evidence is in.
Oh yeah, I didn't mean to imply that I ASSUMED that every childhood malady out there had a link to vaccines. Absolutely not. In fact, MOST childhood maladies probably have nothing to do with vaccines at all. It's just that the research on the long-term effects is just so incomplete. Obviously, when serious immediate consequences are noticed, vaccines are pulled from the market (like the rotovirus vaccine fiasco), but I just wish I knew whether some vaccines were riskier than the diseases they prevent (seriously, what is so dangerous about childhood chicken pox?). Plus, there's always that .05% of kids or whatever who have some horrible debilitating reaction to the vaccines, and while I poo-pooed my own tiny risk of death for my VBAC, now that my kid is out and breathing, I seem unable to see past that miniscule risk number. Gah!
And ironically, when I did research on Hep B, it wasn't the specific risks of the vaccine that were so awful sounding to me (the MS thing seemed pretty unlikely), but that the risks of kids getting Hep B as infants is pretty small, so why not wait? Interestingly, the research I did seemed to imply that infants and children of Hep B - negative moms were at the greatest risk of Hep B transmission in hospitals or other healthcare settings. I agree that it would be a good vaccine to have as they get older, but I didn't see the point of subjecting them to it just hours after birth. I'll just have them get it later.
I don't really think vaccines are bad in general, and the public health advocate in me definitely thinks that the "captive audience" feature of childhood health care is a good reason for the government to indicate vaccines at such a young age. But I am a pretty savvy consumer, and I'll pay attention to my kids' healthcare as long as they live in my house, so I would be perfectly capable of getting their vaccines later than the first year of life, when their little immune systems are just getting revved up.
And the jaundice itself didn't make me think Henry was delicate, just my bizarre association with the hospital stay and general illness. He was in the hospital, so therefore he is more delicate. Don't try to understand the logic, because it isn't there. What's really funny is that I remember when Margaret was small, I had no real intuition about how to parent her, so I turned to books over and over. That didn't work out so well, since the books all disagreed with one another, and over time, I developed some ideas for myself. Now I'm all intuition it seems. I don't claim to have an accurate intuition, though: after all, my intuition told me during pregnancy that Henry was a girl.
Maybe when you visit, Karen, you can talk to me a little more about the bilirubin. My ped seemed unable to explain why the high bilirubin numbers were bad for him, other than "they're bad." I was too exhausted at the time to do the research, but if jaundice really is so common, is it truly as dangerous a phenomenon as they say?(obviously, for those kids who are still jaundiced a month later, yes). What would be the problem of just letting their systems work it out over the course of a couple of weeks and checking back later to see that the liver is doing it's work? Seriously, I am a strong believer in the human body as a truly amazing machine, and it just doesn't make sense that something so common is really that dangerous, especially given our current high standards of nutrition, hygiene, etc. But THAT is a completely different topic! ; )
Parenting...it'll make ya'(or maybe just me) crazy!
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