our pediatrician has been a part of our family since both my husband and i were small. she vividly remembers treating my husband and he is known to be one of her favorite patients from over the years.
she is nearing retirement and sometimes i question her judgment, though i am fond of her and usually trust her- after all, she was the only one who told me to listen to my instincts and NOT listen to my ob/gyn, to NOT take prozac OR paxil while breastfeeding with ppd, that she did not approve (since i was not suicidal etc), and directed me to the safer help i needed.
she is known to have quite strong feelings and i have seen her wrath. she once accused my kids of taking one of her tools. she and her staff called my house repeatedly for a month, asking me if i was SURE, if perhaps i hadn't overlooked it in the car or one of their toy boxes. it took a year for her to acknowledge that it wasn't my kids but a disgruntled employee who had actually stolen several items from her office.
in the past i have felt concerned that my kids were guinea pigs. i know she has a genuine concern and thinks what she is doing is in their best interest and has no fear of the drugs and vaccines she pushes and simply feels very strongly about their benefits. she has brushed off my concerns for years.
when my youngest was born, two weeks into her life, the doctor noticed that her head was growing at an alarming rate. this coincided with the release of a study linking rapid brain growth to autism. over the next four months, i, terrified, watched the rate continue, and it followed the pattern watched in the study. i tearfully brought my concerns to dr, as well as my vax concerns.
she thought i was having a post-partum breakdown and insisted everything was fine, she'd never even heard of this study and that vax concerns were nonsense. now, i can be a bit overemotional at times, and i have certainly been very wrong in the past, so i don't always trust myself. and when family, dh, inlaws, mother, tell me i need to listen to her, i usually assume they are right and i am overreacting or paranoid.
and here we are 5 and 3/4 years later, and youngest dd is fine.
except the day before yesterday, i sensed she was getting sick. i could feel it. my husband said i was nuts. she did not have a degree of fever, but i know i felt something, i just can't put my finger on it. instinct i guess. she was behaving normally, but i just knew.
sure enough, just after supper, she turned flushed and started moping. i took her temp and it was already 102.
i brought her in first thing in the morning (yesterday).
now an important detail is this- when she was 8 months old, she and her siblings all had the flu simultaneously. it was a miserable 2 weeks for my babies. dr was very worried, and checked on them daily. and every year, she would personally call my house and insist we bring them in immediately for their flu shots, as soon as she got her order in. i managed to avoid her one or two of these years but...
she got me this year!
my older two got the actual shot, but youngest got the inhaled version. i had never seen it- two squirts up the nostrils. this was back in december.
so imagine my surprise when dr tells me she thinks she has the flu...
she personally pulled me out of the waiting room ahead of the people who were ahead of us and put us in a room they don't normally use while patients waited in the regular rooms. she briefly looked dd over and concluded quickly and wrote up rx for tamiflu (which i'm assuming is also the squirty-up-the-nosy vax?)
i said, are you sure? and she says, i am not going to bother testing, it's my gut feeling that it's a second strain that's going around or a mild case of the one she was vax'd against...
i said, please test her b/c i know strep was going around at her school, and also, she has these 3 strange blisters or bites on her legs that are huge, cellulitis looking and very red, almost purple, and she says well, just trust me, she has the symptoms, you have the symptoms (and i sure do have the
symptoms)- it's flu it's flu it's flu, i have a waiting room full of patients. if it makes you feel better wait till tomorrow, and you will see these symptoms of flu blossom before your eyes, and then you can fill this.
i have already decided NOT to give her the tamiflu. for once, i am going to to trust my instincts. although, now i do believe it's the flu b/c sure enough those symptoms "blossomed," i am awake here at 4 am b/c she was running 104, and coughing and coughing, but the way we were whisked in there, the way she just knew, after knowing dd was the one she gave the nasily things to...just makes me wonder...
and wtf is tamiflu really going to do for her? it obviously did not stop her from catching it! is it actually going to make her feel better?? i just don't know if it's worth the risk. i will take care of the child the old fashioned way- soup, fluids, lukewarm baths, tlc. her little body is already being overloaded w/ acetaminophen and ibuprofen...that's bad enough, right?
i guess i'm here to sort out thoughts, or maybe because i want someone to back me up for once. i can't seem to get it anywhere else in my life. i'm always the crazy overprotective fringe mom, told my instincts are wack.
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she is nearing retirement and sometimes i question her judgment, though i am fond of her and usually trust her- after all, she was the only one who told me to listen to my instincts and NOT listen to my ob/gyn, to NOT take prozac OR paxil while breastfeeding with ppd, that she did not approve (since i was not suicidal etc), and directed me to the safer help i needed.
she is known to have quite strong feelings and i have seen her wrath. she once accused my kids of taking one of her tools. she and her staff called my house repeatedly for a month, asking me if i was SURE, if perhaps i hadn't overlooked it in the car or one of their toy boxes. it took a year for her to acknowledge that it wasn't my kids but a disgruntled employee who had actually stolen several items from her office.
in the past i have felt concerned that my kids were guinea pigs. i know she has a genuine concern and thinks what she is doing is in their best interest and has no fear of the drugs and vaccines she pushes and simply feels very strongly about their benefits. she has brushed off my concerns for years.
when my youngest was born, two weeks into her life, the doctor noticed that her head was growing at an alarming rate. this coincided with the release of a study linking rapid brain growth to autism. over the next four months, i, terrified, watched the rate continue, and it followed the pattern watched in the study. i tearfully brought my concerns to dr, as well as my vax concerns.
she thought i was having a post-partum breakdown and insisted everything was fine, she'd never even heard of this study and that vax concerns were nonsense. now, i can be a bit overemotional at times, and i have certainly been very wrong in the past, so i don't always trust myself. and when family, dh, inlaws, mother, tell me i need to listen to her, i usually assume they are right and i am overreacting or paranoid.
and here we are 5 and 3/4 years later, and youngest dd is fine.
except the day before yesterday, i sensed she was getting sick. i could feel it. my husband said i was nuts. she did not have a degree of fever, but i know i felt something, i just can't put my finger on it. instinct i guess. she was behaving normally, but i just knew.
sure enough, just after supper, she turned flushed and started moping. i took her temp and it was already 102.
i brought her in first thing in the morning (yesterday).
now an important detail is this- when she was 8 months old, she and her siblings all had the flu simultaneously. it was a miserable 2 weeks for my babies. dr was very worried, and checked on them daily. and every year, she would personally call my house and insist we bring them in immediately for their flu shots, as soon as she got her order in. i managed to avoid her one or two of these years but...
she got me this year!
my older two got the actual shot, but youngest got the inhaled version. i had never seen it- two squirts up the nostrils. this was back in december.
so imagine my surprise when dr tells me she thinks she has the flu...
she personally pulled me out of the waiting room ahead of the people who were ahead of us and put us in a room they don't normally use while patients waited in the regular rooms. she briefly looked dd over and concluded quickly and wrote up rx for tamiflu (which i'm assuming is also the squirty-up-the-nosy vax?)
i said, are you sure? and she says, i am not going to bother testing, it's my gut feeling that it's a second strain that's going around or a mild case of the one she was vax'd against...
i said, please test her b/c i know strep was going around at her school, and also, she has these 3 strange blisters or bites on her legs that are huge, cellulitis looking and very red, almost purple, and she says well, just trust me, she has the symptoms, you have the symptoms (and i sure do have the
symptoms)- it's flu it's flu it's flu, i have a waiting room full of patients. if it makes you feel better wait till tomorrow, and you will see these symptoms of flu blossom before your eyes, and then you can fill this.i have already decided NOT to give her the tamiflu. for once, i am going to to trust my instincts. although, now i do believe it's the flu b/c sure enough those symptoms "blossomed," i am awake here at 4 am b/c she was running 104, and coughing and coughing, but the way we were whisked in there, the way she just knew, after knowing dd was the one she gave the nasily things to...just makes me wonder...
and wtf is tamiflu really going to do for her? it obviously did not stop her from catching it! is it actually going to make her feel better?? i just don't know if it's worth the risk. i will take care of the child the old fashioned way- soup, fluids, lukewarm baths, tlc. her little body is already being overloaded w/ acetaminophen and ibuprofen...that's bad enough, right?
i guess i'm here to sort out thoughts, or maybe because i want someone to back me up for once. i can't seem to get it anywhere else in my life. i'm always the crazy overprotective fringe mom, told my instincts are wack.
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