…helps the medicine go down, the medicine go dooowwwn, medicine go down!
Something like that, anyway. Today, we made the dreaded trek to the pediatricians office for the H1N1 vaccine. While the process is quick and really relatively painless, the anxiety in my kids, the waiting in the office, the scheduling inconvenient in the middle of long weekend and the holding down of my kids while they scream is purely awful.
The alternative, however, is a hospitalized, feverish, very ill child… in a good scenario. While every person has the right to decide whether or not this vaccine and any vaccine for that matter, is for them and for their children, I am so grateful that we live in a country where if we choose to vaccinate, the vaccines are plentiful. A society where most disease is preventable. A culture where we have clean, modern offices to take our children to receive these medical services.
Thinking of all this makes me also very painfully aware and compelled to acknowledge that not all children in this country have the same basic rights as mine did today. While this isn’t the platform for that debate, it does stir up some questioning. To me, it just doesn’t make basic sense, not any way you cut it or justify it. But….
what this blog, IS about, is a special place for me to acknowledge gratitude and to embrace gratefulness . Today, I am grateful for our vaccines, for clean clinics, for disease prevention… and most of all, for two healthy beautiful children, sleeping soundly with their band-aids the only evidence of our afternoon.
Oh, that, and the chocolate mustaches that colored each of their little faces after we bribed them with ice cream cones for good behavior during flu shots! I’m thankful for the ice cream too. :)
~K
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