Nothing had prepared me for the agony of baby jabs. How am I going to face the baby abattoir again?

[Guest guest]

I think this woman should re-evaluate her position on vaccination!!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/jan/11/health

healthandwellbeing?gusrc=rss & feed=society

Nothing had prepared me for the agony of baby jabs. How am I going to face

the baby abattoir again?

Zoe

The Guardian,

Friday January 11 2008

When T was about a week old, the midwife came round to do his heel-prick

test. All really early baby tests are incredibly obscure, you never hear

about them in the entire rest of a human being's life. They're constantly

being tested for wonky hips and a problem generating vitamin K. You will

never meet a midwife or a doctor who doesn't try to spatchcock your baby and

then say: " Good. " The heel-prick blood test, because it occurs when they're

so young, by definition happens when they're eating, sleeping or already

crying. Ideally, you want them to be already crying, because if some

stranger stabs them in the foot while they are innocently doing one of those

other two things, then even if they are too small to give you a look of

terror and betrayal - which they are - you can easily fill in those gaps

with your imagination. My midwife did the heel-prick too early and had to do

it again, and I am not going to tell you how I felt about this, because it

will make me sound psychotic.

The eight-week jabs are much, much worse. Apart from being born - and the

time he fell out of bed for reasons that were so my fault I've only now, 10

weeks later, been able to say those words out loud - he'd known no pain his

whole life, and here we are, stabbing him in the leg. " Let's just wait till

he stops crying and do the other leg, " says the nurse, who is clearly trying

to make me cry as well. What's she trying to inoculate us against, human

pain? " Ooh, they don't normally cry this long, " she says, and then, " look at

that, he's gone bright red! They don't normally go bright red! " " I think it

s because he's crying ... " " We'll wait to check he isn't having a reaction

before we do the next one, " she says, and now it really is torture, because

we're waiting for an era of peace that definitely, positively isn't going to

happen until me and T have walked out and arrived home. Finally, she gets

tired and just gives him the second jab anyway, and we get home, and I open

the door, and T has pretty much calmed down, and I pick up the post to find

we're booked into the TB clinic the week after.

I've heard terrible stories about the TB injection - it's sub-cuticular, so

they basically have to rough your baby up a bit, make a scratch, before they

stick the needle in. And plus, the jabs are done for a whole postcode on the

same morning, so it's a maelstrom of screaming infants: the place sounds

like an abattoir. My best friend went with her daughter, and from the road

outside her little one said: " Why are those children crying? " J said: " I don

t know, maybe they're hungry. " And her daughter - who is rather sharp -

said: " Why else might they be crying? "

It's too much. I do not want to take T to the Streatham baby abattoir on a

Saturday morning. I want to stay in and play with a Whoozit and, in good

time, when he's 13 and I'm not there, he can have his BCG then. My sister's

midwife said it was because of all the foreigners in the area; they had to

step up immunisations because they weren't routine in the emigrant's home

countries. I wish she hadn't said this. I don't want to be a racist refusnik

I want to be a coward refusnik. There's a difference.

In the end, I got round it by being out of London. I have another

appointment for three months hence, by which time maybe TB will have been

eradicated or I will be on valium.

This still left us with the 12-week injections, and I secured a promise from

my mother that she would take him, but when it came to it, the London

International Mime Festival got in the way. I guess when you've chosen

someone to accompany your screaming baby through injections because they are

quite deaf, the odds are they might also like mime. Instead, C went in and I

waited outside. Amazingly, this was even worse than taking him in myself. It

took much longer than I remembered it (nine-and-a-half minutes, since you

ask), so I logically assumed that T had had a reaction and died. When they

emerged, I could hear them all the way down the corridor, C, T and the nurse

with little T bright red, again, and his mouth stretched square like an

outraged post box. " They don't normally cry like this, " said the nurse, " did

he do this last time? " " Well, yeah, why do you think I sent him in with his

father? "

Against mumps, measles and rubella, I plan to find some way to immunise him with

herbs.