You’re lucky. With my son, right out of the womb he wouldn’t sleep with out a pacifier in his mouth. The first few days I was ready to duct-tape the darned thing in.
With the second, Sue (my wife) told me Mary (the baby) was keeping all the other babies in the nursery awake with her crying - and wouldn’t take a pacifier. The second day Mary found her thumb and became a little lamb.
Methinks you misunderstand “religious freedom.” The government must be neutral as regards religion - in this case, it cannot require only Mormon children to be vaccinated; it must require all children.
Let’s take a hypothetical. Suppose your sect commands that you not allow yourself to be judged by your fellow mortals. This means you do not submit to testing. Fine; the government won’t interfere. But it is not required to allow you to drive with taking the driver’s test. Would you consider this a violation of your religious freedom?
Finally, nothing about religious freedom requires the government to expose other people to danger. Your child represents a danger to the other children in the school. You want to increase the risk of your kid dying, by my guest; that’s your right. You do not have the right to increase the risk of the death of other people’s kids.
Sua
Please stop spreading this myth. The wild claim that the mercury used to preserve vaccines causes everything from ADD to retardation is just that - a wild, unproven claim.
Yes, mercury is poisonous. If it wasn’t poisonous, it wouldn’t be a preservative. But the amount used in vaccines is hardly enought to cause harm to human beings. Otherwise most Americans would be drooling idiots by now.
Wait, is this meant to support or refute your assertion about mercury? 
Children of my generation:
Had mercury in their vaccines
Were predominately bottlefed
Often had mothers who drank throughout their pregnancy
Often had mothers who smoked throughout their pregnancy
Often had mothers who drank coffee throughout their pregnancy
Often had working mothers.
That explains a lot. Particularly reality shows.
Oh, I forgot:
Grew up in houses with lots of lead paint.
As all of this applies to me, I am now shocked I am able to walk and chew gum at the same time.
(By the way, I’m not advocating raising a toddler in a house filled with lead paint, or downing a fifth of Jack Daniels to celebrate the end of morning sickness)
I’m not spreading a myth. I am saying what happened to a friend’s kid. It has been medically documented that that is what happened. The amount used as a preservative is well below the amount needed to injure someone, even a tiny baby, in the usual dosage. Little Isaac got vaccinated with a bad batch. Hundreds of millions of children are saved from far worse by application of the same vaccine by the same companies.
No. It didn’t. You’re friend’s child may be developmentally challenged, but if your friend has any proof that a vaccine caused the child’s problems it would be national news.
As it is this “mercury vaccine” nonsense is being spread by lawyers who are drumming up business.
Try this (I did): go to www.yahoo.com. Search for “mercury in vaccines”. The first 30 hits are all law firms. No news stories. No research. No evidence. Just law suits.
By the way…
Please keep in mind that all the vaccines you got as a child had mercury in them. Are you retarded?
This is the other side of the “Boob nazi” coin. Labor&Delivery/Post partum nurses often find moms nearly in tears after the lactation specialist has ripped them a new one for saying the “F” word in relation to feeding their baby.
Many of those nurses have children of their own. They are also working medical professionals who understand both the pathophysiology behind the reasoning for breastfeeding and the pressures put on a mom in todays world. If you think that those nurses are not as well as, if not better equipped to advise you on what is best for your baby, you might want to spend a little more time listening to them. They want your baby to be healthy too.
I agree here totally, many lactations specialists preach the breast like its the gospel and you’re going to hell if you don’t breastfeed. I haven’t met a non lactation specialist nurse yet (and I know more than a few) who would tell you formula was better, but none of them would threaten or berate you for feeding formula.
No, and neither are the millions of children who got the vaccine formulated as it is supposed to be. I am in no way saying that the vaccine is bad. I’m saying there was a problem with one (that I know of) batch that affected this kid and others in the area who also were vaccinated with the same batch.
Vaccines Good. This particular batch Bad.
I did do a search and found several pages on the vaccine/mercury thing. Many were on lawsuits. People are now buying domains for birthday parties and class reunions, so it doesn’t strike me as odd that a law group in a class action suit should post its information where the whole class can see what the updates are.
That aside, from the other sites it seems like although the vaccines of several years ago did have mercury in them, they started to be removed around 1998 and many if not all vaccines in the US are now mercury-free. If the only thing keeping me from protecting my kid was worries about mercury, I’d now go for it. Not that it actually stopped me, or Isaac’s mom, from getting the rest of the necessary shots. I have older relatives with polio. Chicken pox nearly killed my father-in-law at age 42. It’s scary what can happen.
If the original poster on this topic (and I’m sorry, I don’t remember who it was) has a different reason than the mercury thing for not vaccinating, could you please post it?
Just a personal request here: Could we stop using the word Nazi? I do not mean to belittle how you felt after this extremely unprofessional person spoke to you, but I seriously doubt she offered to gas your extended family if you didn’t breastfeed.
If someone in a hospital treats you badly, you have the absolute right and duty to complain to their superior. You can and should demand their head, or at least their job, on a platter. You should expect an apology at the very least. The hospitals I’ve been in have both had “client care specialists” come around to see how I was doing and make sure I felt I was being treated well. I’m sure not all hospitals have this resource, but a head nurse would probably be a good person to start with otherwise.
I had understood that most new vaccines were now being made without the mercury compound anyway, so is it OK with everyone to vaccinate now? No, I thought not.
Not all vaccinations, btw, are solely to protect the child. Rubella is a very mild childhood disease, but when pregnant mothers are exposed to it, it severely damages the unborn child, causing (IIRC) blindness and/or retardation. The R in MMR is meant to protect pregnant mothers of small children, so we’ll hope that Cessandra’s baby doesn’t get sick and meet any pregnant women.
I hope this concludes our vaccination hijack. A new thread, perhaps?
My wife Cyn works high risk labor and delivery this is the nickname the nurses use, not one of my own construction.
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You have an interesting POV on the world of medical HR. Poor attitudes are often tolerated from otherwise technically competent staff.
Much of the emergency specialty world (which L&D is a type of) is a very “take the bull by the horns” kind of task. You are in a situation that you have little control over when you are delivering, and the staff around you has the tools and the talent to save moms and babies who died 50-100 years ago. People often have problems with that “loss of control” and feel the need to lash out and complain to try and assert some control over the situation. I saw this as an EMT as well, you just grit your teeth and say sorry, then keep at it.
Sorry if they didn’t cuddle you up and fluff your pillow, back then, that was all the could do. If they have the time they will do their best to make your experience as easy and pleasant as possible, but don’t depend on it, or expect retribution when those nurses are often taking care of 3-4 patients each (and are supposed to have 2 at most).
Sure she will be right by to see you when shes done with the 4th c-section of her shift.
First, nobody is asking to be cuddled and fluffed. They are asking to be treated decently and helped in a reasonable manner.
Second, we’re talking about a lactation consultant, not an EMT, L&D or any other type of medical professional whose every action directly affects the chances that the person they’re with gets to live. If you need to rip my brand new high fashion leather pants to stop the arterial bleeding in the compound fracture on my leg, then please do so and make no apology- I’d rather have the leg.
A lactation consultant’s job is to take the time to help new moms get over common (and not so common) breastfeeding issues, and to make sure that they are making positive choices for themselves and their families. Maybe there’s a rush and she can only spend 30 minutes with each person, but that could be 30 minutes of helping or 30 minutes of making a bad situation worse. Maybe that consultant is actually turning people who would otherwise breatfeed away from it with her attitude. If I was paying her to help people breastfeed and she’s doing the opposite, I would want to know.
I stick by my original statement. If your lactation consultant comes in and you’re teaching your newborn to blow smoke rings, she is welcome to rip you a new one. If you’re trying to get to know and learn how to nourish this new person in your life, then you deserve and should expect her thoughtful help.
(regarding the patient care specialist)
This is not a nurse. This is an administrator-type. I certainly hope she’s not doing c-sections!
Just to throw a new wrinkle in here, the lactation consultants at our hospital weren’t very available or helpful. It was a nurse who helped me start pumping (Cranky Jr decided to hang out the NICU with the nurses for awhile) and the NICU nurses who kept encouraging me. We hired a private LC to come to our home when we finally brought the baby home, and she was a wonderful, supportive, nonjudgmental person.
You just can’t generalize, can you?
And I had both good and bad LCs in the hospital. One who looked at me and said “it takes both of you, if she won’t latch on, she won’t latch on, she has to decide.” Now, is that discougaging breastfeeding, or being realistic? Another who told me, “Don’t introduce the bottle, because you’ll cause nipple confusion and she will never breastfeed?” We did (we had to, it was that or hospitalization, or an SNS, and I hated the idea of an SNS), and she eventually latched on (and then wouldn’t go back to the bottle when daycare arrived - and then, after six months of pumping for daycare, decided she preferred the bottle and that was that - she has been a challenging child since day one). I was on a breastfeeding board with one woman who was feeding her baby expressed milk from an eyedropper six weeks after the baby was born because she wasn’t latching on - on the advice of the lactation consultant. Baby wasn’t gaining any weight and mom was tired all the time. Oy! Yet everyone else on the board thought the advice she was getting from the LC was sound - and were telling her to switch peditricians because the peditrician wasn’t supportive! (BTW, that incident got me kicked off that Breastfeeding Support board - I wasn’t supportive of someone starving their child).
In my sister’s ward (ICU), the patient care specialist is not a purely administrative job. Its a regular RN with additional duties.
It was in reference to you suggestion to talk to the charge nurse.
Sorry you kinda got caught in the blast radius of my post to cessandra on the busy nurse rant…
To start with I do understand religious freedom. Your analogy of driving is incorrect, driving is not a right, it is a privilege. Education is a right, the government cannot require that you violate your religious beliefs in order to recieve an education. This is what has been decided by the courts. If you assert that you understand religious freedom better than the courts, then maybe you should look twice at yourself.
I read many things before making my decision on vaccination, in fact there are a large number of parents who mad the same decision I did. The nurse who works for my childrens’ pediatrician doesn’t vaccinate her children and she works in the healthcare profession. The pediatrician himself does not push vaccination on parents, he believes it is their decision. The books I have read are written, for the most part, by doctors. A large number of those being pediatricians. You might take a step back and look at the very sources you cite and ask why you believe them without ever questioning them. The CDC utilizes scare tactics more than any of the other sources I have read, even the hardcore anti-vaccination groups. The pharmaceutical lobby is one of the largest in the nation, and yet you seem to think that everything the government says is the gospel truth on this subject, while I have seen many of you try to prove the government dead wrong in other threads. You would do well to step back and take a good look at what you are espousing as being informed.
Some of my best friends children got chicken pox, after being vaccinated, as did the majority of their school. I recognize that this is little more than anecdotal proof, but so was everything else cited in this thread. The fact is, vaccinations do not always work, and are not 100% safe. I made my choice and have only asked that it be respected. I respect your choice to vaccinate and do not think you are an idiot for doing so, you simply came to a different conclusion than I did. I could be defensive and swear you didn’t understand what you read, accuse you of being an idiot, and post all sorts of information, but I do not.
Further, you refuse to accept that perhaps I know more about my children, and what is best for them, than you do. Even HennaDancer has come to understand that many parents have reasons for choosing formula that she didn’t consider. Is it really necessary for me to reveal my childrens’ particular medical reasons that keep me from vaccinating? Or will you finally accept that my husband and I are their parents and it is OUR job, not YOURS, to make those decisions for them?
I do not feel a need to defend my decisions any further. I have made my choice and your scare tactics are not going to change my mind. You have degraded me, accused me of putting other people at risk, and made me out to be un-educated. None of this is in the least bit true. I am now very thankful that you are not running this country and that we still have some freedom left!