The Best Defense

I was talking with someone earlier today about the pros and cons of vaccinations. I've been thinking about it ever since, which of course meant, Hey! Blog topic! So here I am, climbing onto my soapbox.

I was never vaccinated as a kid. Not that my parents had any moral objections to it. No, they just never really got around to it. Now, we didn't have medical insurance, or money, but mostly it was just a matter of my parents being the kind of people who just never got around to taking us to the doctor, even when they did have insurance, until we were seriously ill (which is how I almost got rheumatic fever and how my sister did get rheumatic heart disease.)

I never got sick as a consequence of this. Never got measles, mumps, whooping cough, polio, none of it. The only times I got seriously ill were things that you couldn't prevent with a vaccination, like my recurrent bouts of strep throat. So you might say that not having vaccinations didn't do me any harm.

Yeah, right.

I was lucky enough to never be exposed to anything, but that was only luck and the fact that all the kids I played with had been vaccinated. When I was an adult I went to my local hospital and got everything taken care of in two visits (and hooo, boy was I sick afterwards.) Unfortunately, this was before there was a chickenpox vaccine and I never heard about it after it came out. Not until it was too late, at any rate.

Because of course, I'd never been exposed to chicken pox, either. My first exposure came in my early 3o's. I'd been playing with a friend's children. The next day? They came out with spots. 24 days later, I got sick.

There's a slight problem, though, if you get a childhood illness when you're an adult. No-one believes you. I told the doctor I'd been exposed to chicken pox 24 days before. I told him I'd never had it or been exposed to it as a child. He told me that it was impossible that I could have it, that adults don't get chicken pox, that I probably had been exposed as a child without knowing it and was immune without having gotten it. Or I'd had it when I was too young to remember. He gave me a couple of aspirin and told me I was just stressed.

We went back the next day, when I was feeling worse. The husband was really upset and forced the doctor to see us (we hadn't been married very long and he was still in ultra-protective mode.) This time the doctor considered the possibility I had encephalitis, but decided again that it was just stress making me sick and sent me home to take more aspirin. The lesions I'd developed, he assured me, were just pimples.

On our third visit he finally took me seriously. Maybe it was the fact that my face was swollen to twice its normal size and a lovely shade of deep puce that helped him figure out that I wasn't an hysterical idiot. Not that it mattered. He sent me home with a prescription for calamine lotion.

The thing is, chicken pox in adults, despite that doctor's cavalier attitude, is very serious. Adults are only responsible for 5% of all chicken pox cases in the U.S., but account for 55% of all chicken pox deaths each year.

The sores wound up going down into my throat. I was fine, if uncomfortable, until everything started crusting over. All of a sudden I couldn't swallow, even to drink. I remember lying in my bed, the sickest I've ever been in my life, letting myself drool onto a towel because I couldn't even swallow my own saliva. I got confused, started losing my balance, and became incoherent, probably from dehydration (I would guess.) I was the sickest I have ever been in my life. I actually wondered at one point if I was going to die.

I don't ever want my daughters to go through that. It was bad. It was really, really bad. And that was just chicken pox. Imagine getting one of the more serious "childhood illnesses".

The girls are getting every vaccination I can get for them. I'm not interested in taking any chances with their futures.

I'm not saying this is what every parent should do. We've all got to make the best decisions we can for our children, according to our knowledge of them and our understanding of the world around us. But, this is my decision for my children and this is why.

*PS: I was wrong. There was one vaccination that I got when I was little. I have a scar on my arm from where I got a small pox vaccination when I was very little, and a few years later my mother badgered a doctor until he agreed to give it to my little brother, too. So Mom had some priorities right.