[Image IDs: Text reading: This is from a friend of mine who is a pediatrician:
"A family came in with their 2mo. And they were very hesitant about vaccines. "Which ones are really important?"
So I went through each disease for which the child would be vaccinated today.
*I told them about diphtheria and the 30% mortality rate, how diphtheria toxin is one of the most toxic substances known, as a single molecule can kill a cell. I told them about how this disease used to terrify communities.
*They'd already heard of tetanus. Everyone has heard of tetanus.
*I told them about pertussis and the baby I saw who coughed and coughed and coughed and coughed and coughed....until he went into laryngospasm. We did everything we could. I will never forget his mother throwing himself at our feet begging us not to say what we were going to say. I let that family see the tears playing in my eyes as I described the memory. They needed to know that I am doing this because I fucking care. Not because of some quality metric.
*We'd already discussed how hepatitis B is spread by nonsexual transmission and how in the prevaccine era, as many as 65% of infants born to HBV positive fathers had HBV by the tme they were were a year old. We talked about how that is a life sentence before age 1.
*I talked about the baby I watched die of pneumococcal sepsis. Another mother at our feet. Another family destroyed by a microbe.
*I described a cricoidotomy in graphic detail to explain what Haemophilus influenza type B does.
*I was admitted for rotavirus in February of 1979. I still have the hospital bill for $20. My mother told me about how sick I was. And 25 years later, I became a resident and I saw babies with rotavirus. You could hear the diarrhea from across the emergency department. We had to do our own IVs at the NYC hospital. The babies were just so sick and all we could do was keep them hydrated and wait for them to recover. And then in the fall of 2006 the rotavirus vaccine came out. And in February of 2008 I was the senior on the floor and there weren't any rotavirus kids. It was just...gone.
And I asked that mother, now that she'd asked me which vaccines were important, I was going to turn the questions around. Which ones did she think were important?
That baby got every recommended immunization today. I won. RFJ Jr. lost. The parents won; that mother won't be throwing herself at my feet.
Most importantly, the baby won.
Today, I was a hero and this is why I am a pediatrician." /End IDs]
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