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I Vaccinate My Child Because I Failed Medical School
We would all be better off if we trusted people who were smarter than us.
It’s one of the hardest things as a parent to watch your child in pain. It’s even worse when you have to hold them down and put them through that pain.
My son was 2 months old, and it was time for his first set of vaccines. He was due to get 5 shots. That’s a lot.
Like most people, I hate shots. I’ve never gotten used to them, even though I got them pretty frequently. During high school and college, I used to travel overseas a lot on volunteer trips during the summers. Each year, I got a new set of shots to protect me from a host of deadly diseases, depending on what part of the the world I was traveling to.
As an adult, you try your best to be nonchalant. But I knew that those nurses could smell my fear. At least I knew the pain was for a reason.
Yet here I was, needing to subject my son to pain and a bit of trauma without him understanding why it was happening. I knew it would be fine, since he wouldn’t remember the experience. In fact, he would forget it ever happened 5 minutes later.
But the immediate experience is still emotionally difficult.
