Making different choices

My own journey to making choices different from the mainstream occurred when I had my son. After researching, I felt that if I were to have a planned cesarean it would be less risky than attempting a VBAC (Vaginal Birth After Cesarean) that ended up in a C-section, but more risky than a successful VBAC. Knowing that I simply don’t operate well according to other peoples…anything…I just knew that I would fail in a hospital environment, so I did the common sense, rational, intuitive thing any woman who happened to be me would do: I had a homebirth.

One of my midwives had eight children and many, many grand children. She gently brought up the topic of vaccines and mentioned that her four that she inoculated on schedule were sick with typical childhood sniffles, flus, coughs and colds, whereas her unvaccinated children were consistently healthier, by far. Of course, it’s a small sample of a totally anecdotal nature. But it was enough to get me thinking. I rejected my own mother’s tendency toward control-freakish health-nuttiness and had happily marched myself into my first C-section, which was actually medically necessary, followed by choosing to follow the recommended schedule for vaccines. When I went through the very traumatic ending of my first marriage, which culminated with him waving a kitchen cleaver around threatening to kill himself, me and our daughter, me leaving the locked room where I’d been hiding out with said daughter, leaving her there with a prayer, coming into the living room, grabbing the phone and giving him the. choice to have me call the therapist or the police - well, even if a pro-vaxx person can understand how I got behind, and how I, like a good parent, when I realized it had happened, took her in to get her caught up. Immediately after, she developed severed eczema which resulted in her constantly having to wear bandaids to school, interrupted her sleep and constant itching and scratching that it looked like she’d been in multiple cat fights with scratches and bleeding patches all over her.

To be continued

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7268563/

“Vaccination before 1 year of age was associated with increased odds of developmental delays (OR = 2.18, 95% CI 1.47–3.24), asthma (OR = 4.49, 95% CI 2.04–9.88) and ear infections (OR = 2.13, 95% CI 1.63–2.78).”