Lion and Magic Boy

I haven’t whined much lately so I guess I am due for some. It’s a full moon and I don’t feel like writing and I am tired of searching for Wordpress themes (long story) and I should probably just have a drink or something but a bath sounds much much better.

Today was the day all the children got caught up on their immunizations. I wrote about this a little over at Strollerderby, but you should know that Eric is almost four and until today had never received a vaccination of any kind. By the time he was born I was convinced that there was something seriously wrong with some vaccines, and subjecting this tiny frail little person to them seemed wrong. So I hid my head in the sand and did nothing. Frankly, the information out there about vaccinations is difficult to wade through because as I see it, there are biases wherever you look.

However, the idea of social responsibility got to me, and combining that with the fact that the children are going to public school this year and as a result I can no longer claim a “religious-wink-wink” exemption (although I’m an ordained minister - really!) for immunizations, I figured to climb one more rung up the letting-go ladder and just have them vaccinated.

The whole shebang. What the hell. If the kids die from the vaccinations, then I’ll be convinced that immunizations really do contain mercury and formaldehyde and animal organs and human tissue and I can blog about it, and if they don’t die they can just get on the bus next Tuesday with the other kids.

But first we had to know what shots Nathaniel and Serena had received so to know what they still needed, since they both had received some but not all of what is recommended. I enlisted the aid of The Ex to place phone calls (since I avoid the phone like the plague; ironic that there’s no vaccination for that) and obtain medical records. He made calls but got no records, suggesting that perhaps I would be more persuasive. The hell. And I found out yesterday that the county’s free immunization service operates TODAY ONLY, and not again until after school starts, so if they wanted to get on that bus next week it had to be today or not at all. Except, I had none of their medical records, being a rather disorganized sort of person and having moved twice in the past two years.

So we packed snacks into the car for a multi-hour foray involving multiple stops to obtain the records that we needed before eventually showing up at the clinic. I called ahead at stop #1 and they told me that they could not release the records so I slowed my speech way down like I was talking to someone with a fair bit of brain damage and also got the high-pitched whine that causes dogs to cringe out of my voice and pretty soon she told me they could just make a copy of the part I needed (because I didn’t care about the rest of the records) and I told her we’d be there in five minutes; could they be ready then because we had other things to do? There was a lengthy pause and she said she’d do her best so when we got there I was prepared to camp there with three kids in the waiting room and make them so uncomfortable they’d do anything to get us out of there, but when we got there she had the paper waiting.

For the next stop we had to drive through farmland full of peaches and cross a bridge and the river under it. It was a shock to see one of Nathaniel’s 5th grade classmates in the waiting room of this second doctor. I felt obligated to tell them that we weren’t coming back to the Waldorf school this year, but the mom must have missed the word “unofficial” in my explanation, since she proceeded to head straight for the school later and inform Nathaniel’s teacher, much to her great surprise and shock. (Waldorf teachers become quite close to the kids; the idea is to spend 8 years with one class of children, and even after a year it tends to feel like family as opposed to a regular parent-teacher relationship) So we sat uncomfortably in the waiting room for several minutes after the helpful desk teenager told me that they couldn’t release anything today. However I fixed her with my Psychic Evil Eye and they called my name not long afterward and handed me what I needed.

Then we crossed another bridge (same river) and then recrossed it after consulting a map, drove awhile and crossed again and went pretty much straight to our destination even though I don’t know where anything is in this effing state (who ever thought of orienting an entire county to a river! Had not these people heard of a compass?) and haven’t got my bearings yet even after being here 12 years.

So we waited a long time in a sparse waiting room filled with the type of people you’d expect to find in an immunization clinic, people that prompted a question from Nathaniel on the way home that resulted in an impromptu discussion about poverty and the American healthcare and medical insurance system, all of which Nathaniel thinks is terribly unfair.

But we were there well over an hour and Eric’s patience slowly drained out of him and by the time we got in the little room with the nurse and all the needles he was beyond behaving in any normal sort of way, and the little guy got three huge shots with a combined seven doses of all sorts of stuff, and his shock at being duped like that, taken to a little room with a scale and a cabinet and a sink and a trash can, and then HELD DOWN AND HURT NOT ONCE BUT THREE THREE THREE TIMES, was more injustice than he could take.

And doing all of that, holding everyone together (Serena, Queen of Pain, did remarkably well and uttered not a sound during her own ordeal) has exhausted me. And I’m tired. And I wept when we got home and I had a few minutes alone. And I don’t even know why.

[tags]immunizations, vaccinations, public health, ouch[/tags]