First off I realized in my last post that saying I'm "pretty much against vaccinations" is really vague and wasn't really the right wording so if you really care to know what I meant by it you can ask me! :)
Secondly, Emeric had his neurology appt. and they upped his meds again. No other major news other than she wants an MRI repeated in December/January since it will have been a year. Basically she said the plan is to work on getting the seizures fully under control. I guess I thought that was ALWAYS the plan?????
We were driving along today and Kylie saw two dead chickens on the road and she said, "Mom, I guess those chickens didn't stay by the white line!" (She knows you don't cross the white line when you're on the side of the road while riding bike and now she knows what could happen if you do!) :D
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I am just curious, Why DID those chickens cross the road??
=)
So why don't you believe in vaccinations? I can pretty much guess but you should share you view, after all it is your blog!!
I for one believe in vaccination, maybe not all of them, but overall I think they have been a good thing for the general population. They improve the lives of countless children in third world countries, if they get them. I know a lot of people around here who are purists and haven't gotten their kids vaccinated. So now we have a resurgence of whooping cough and unfortunately some kids have even died from it. Such a shame since it was so easily preventable. The thing about not vaccinating is that when everyone stops doing it the diseases we think we are all protected from come back and even with medical care they can be deadly. I guess the real debate should be risk vs. benefit. Is it worth the risk of an adverse reaction to keep a population healthy. Or are our own individual lives more important the the collective community?
Just my opinion anyway.
Miranda
Good thoughts Miranda... I'm freezing corn right now I don't have tons of time to write back but in general I think SOME vaccinations are helpful. Others like the MMR, Hep B, Rotavirus, Chicken Pox, etc. I don't see as deadly diseases. Twenty years ago Chicken Pox was a rite of passage for kids and of course there were complications but *most* children did not die from the disease. Now, just because there's a vaccination people are made to believe it's a deadly disease. And I don't beleive a lot of the vaccines grant full immunity. Again, chicken pox vaccine. There's a surge among the elderly of shingles and chicken pox and IMO due to vaccines that do not cause life long immunity and then you end up with it as an adult which is much, much worse than getting it as a child.
Also, there are lots of diseases that I believe have been erradicated due to better hygiene, good water, etc. For example, people used to die of strep throat, small pox, etc. and there are no vaccines yet people do not die from them now.
I am not 100% against vaccines but I am definitely against vaccines in kids under 1, preferably 2 as I think the vaccines overload their immature immune systems and the risk at that time outweigh the benefits.
Emeric's first seizure was within days of his 2 month shots. I do believe there's a strong correlation and I've talked to many, many people who's kids have special needs and they too reacted to their shots.
I do not believe the shots caused his Epilepsy, or Autism, etc. but I do believe they can exaggerbate an underlying condition. Because of that we chose not to have Emeric vaccinated anymore.
The risks are seemingly small but when it's your child that has a reaction you look at it differently. Not YOU just the general you! :)
Again, I can see a place for some shots in older children although I still believe that in most cases natural immunity is beneficial.
Pertussis can be deadly but typically is not unless you're infant, the elderly, immune suppressed, etc. The thing is, by the time you have full immunity you're already over 6 months of age and by the time you're old your immunity has worn off! So who is it really protecting?
Lots of things to think about on both sides and I don't tend to take a strong stance on this issue. At least I wouldnt' push it down someone's throat. If they asked my opinion I would definitely share!
I have lots more I could say but no time right now! :)
Yes, I think you are right that the benefits sometimes are not worth the risk. Like the flu shot, what is it really protecting you from? The chance that that years vaccine is the actual flu strain that will hit? And in most years there is more than one strain causing the illness. So each years vaccine is really just a hope at protection, never a guarantee.
As far as the chicken pox go, I think the overall idea with the vaccine is that it actually prevents shingles, not causes them. The vaccine has only been around since 1995 and the surge in the elderly who are getting shingles never even had the vaccine. The reason the elderly get shingles is due to the fact that they did in fact get the live chicken pox virus when they were kids and once you get it it never goes away, like herpes. So once your immune system is compromised the virus comes back, resulting in shingles. The vaccination is not the live virus and by getting it, your immune system is then more likely to attack the real virus when it sees it, thus keeping you from getting chicken pox and later in life shingles. This is of course the theory and not proven yet, since the vaccine hasn't actually been around long enough to see if the kids that have had it will get shingles or not. But their chances will likely be lessened if they can avoid getting the live virus.
I am not so sure about some of the other vaccines, but I do know that when I worked in the hospital there was an adult who had rubella and she nearly died. Getting these diseases as an adult is probably a greater risk to you than if you get them as a child.
As far as the eradicated diseases like smallpox and polio. The only reason we are safe now is due to vaccines in the first place. If there was in fact a resurgence of the small pox virus, a lot of people could actually die. Even with better health care and clean water a viruses can still kill you. Good hygiene and clean water will only help stop the spread of the virus, not cure you if you get it.
The world we live in today is far more global than it ever used to be. So even if a disease is rarely seen in our country it doesn't mean it isn't prevalent somewhere else. As people travel from one place to another they spread these diseases and although some people can get sick and have few problems other people might not be so lucky. You know first hand that what might affect one child severely does relatively little to another child. So much of how we react, has to do with our own body chemistry and how it mixes with the foreign substances we put in it.
I like you don't feel strongly one way or another about people actually being vaccinated, when they live in a country where it actually is a matter of choice and not life or death. But I do feel strongly about information and don't think you can ever have to much of it to make informed decisions.
You really have a good understanding of this stuff, have you ever taken microbiology? A lot of info about viruses and how they get into our cells and mask and mutate themselves to hide from our immune systems. There are some theories that many diseases are originally caused by viruses. Changing the DNA of our cells, turning them into cancer cells or changing the way they work. So even if our body finds and gets rid of the virus, it has started a chain reaction in our cells that can then cause some horrible disease. I wonder if the toxins in our environment don't also do the same thing. Especially in small children whose small bodies and undeveloped immune systems just can't handle the large toxic load they are exposed to.
That is probably a whole other topic(=
Miranda
wow i didn't know that emeric's seizures started that early. did you guys vaccinate the girls? we haven't gotten any vaccinations for either of the kids yet. i wanted to wait till they were older if we decided to anyway. we have some information on the different vaccinations, but haven't read it yet, so we still haven't decided if we'll vaccinate them at all. i always like to hear other people's opinions on the subject though.
i totally agree with natural immunity. no, i don't generally let my child suck on the shopping cart handle, but i'm not one of those moms that wipes EVERYTHING down before their kid touches it!
i got sidetracked by vaccination discussion so the real reason i was gonna comment was to say thank you for the homeschool/educational links the other day. i finally got to check them all out today and i found some great stuff!
Erin,
Yeah, Emeric got his shots at 2 months because I got talked into it by our doctor. I went in planning on telling her I didn't want any of them and left with some of them. :( It was either 2 or 3 days later when he woke up acting really strange and Jake and I didn't really know what was going on. He sort of acted like he was choking and he was really stiff. He came out of it and it was so late that neither of us were really thinking straight and we just went to bed. The next morning I called my mom and told her I wondered if he'd had a seizure. I also called our doctor who said it didn't sound like a seizure.
A couple months later something similar happened. Then at 6 months we were up at the church and I ran to the bathroom leaving him with my MIL in his walker. I came back and noticed his head flopped back and he wasn't aware that I was even there. I picked him up and he didn't have any muscle tone in his upper body or arms. His eyes were sort of glazed over. It lasted at least a minute or longer and then he again snapped out of it. This time I took him to the pediatrician in Fargo and she examined him and listened to his soft spot with a stethoscope and said he had a murmur in the blood vessels of his brain. Since he had what I thought was a seizure they did an MRI. The MRI was normal and we were told as long as he's developing normally not to worry.
At 9 months he got really sick with a very high fever. It was around 104-105 for 5 days I think. We saw a different pediatrician in Fargo who said he was fine. The fever broke and the day it did he started rolling his eyes up into his head.(Looking back this is a sign of a metabolic disorder, where symptoms start after having been sick or having the immune system stressed like in getting vaccinations)
At this same time I started realizing he didn't seem to be developing quite on time. He wasn't babbling at all although he was sitting up so it wasn't an obvious miss of milestones. Mostly he wouldn't make eye contact, no babbling, etc. I took him to our doctor and told her I thought he was having seizures. She said no, I think he has Autism. I told her I wanted a referral to the pediatric neurologist anyway. She agreed and they scheduled it about 1 month later. Within that time we had him evaluated by Early Intervention and he was considered Globally Delayed. He also started having more "episodes". I say that because no one but me thought they were seizures. He started having up to 20-30 a day. I went and saw the pediatrician again and showed her a video of what I thought was a seizure. She wasn't convinced but agreed to do an EEG. It was normal.
I didn't care that it was normal, I still felt he was having seizures. A few weeks later we saw the neuro and she ordered a 24 hour video EEG and he indeed was having seizures.
He was started on medication and a few days later he started babbling. Surprisingly he said "ma ma ma" which now over a year later he still doesn't say! Little snot!
In the last year his EEG have changed quite a bit and not for the better. His brain, from having so many seizures, has slowed and he's having different types of seizures.
People think only grand mal seizures affect your brain but it isn't true. Emeric had two grand mal seizures when he was sick back this last Spring and while they were scarier I know that even his "little" seizures still affect his brain.
Anyway, that was insanely long... Basically all that to say that I still believe had he not gotten his vaccinations at 2 months we could've possibly held off in terms of when he would start having seizures. He also got sick for about a month aferwards and lost weight and I just think those things probably could've been prevented.
What's hard is that when you're vaccinating at such a young age you never know if your child DOES possibly have an underlying condition. I know many people whose kids started having seizures after getting vaccinated. Or other issues too.
With Emeric I should've known better. WHen I was pregnant with him I told Jake all the time that I felt like something was wrong with him. The day he was born I said, "I just know something is wrong with him" and I always have had this very strong intuition with him that something would be wrong.
I don't like to think of it as something being "wrong" with him and I don't like when people ask what's "wrong" with him but it's all semantics really. Something IS wrong but I don't want him thinking as he's older that something is wrong with him. Ya know?
Anyway, sorry for the novel! LOL
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