I recently took all the kids to the doctor. Everyone was healthy, but when the doctor looked in one of Wink’s ears she said it was a little red and asked if she had been sick recently. I mentioned that she had had a fever a couple weeks before Christmas. The doctor said, “That’s probably it. She also has a swollen gland but that’s normal to take a month or two for the swelling to go down after an infection.” Then she explained that they usually don’t prescribe antibiotics for ear infections unless there is uncontrolled pain. And since Wink wasn’t in any pain, there was nothing to worry about and to just let her know if the fever came back.
I was like, no problem. We aren’t big antibiotic fans anyway.
I like to just do one vaccination at a time and at the end of the appointment, the doctor was assuring me that vaccinations are safe and her own kids are fully vaccinated and encouraging me to catch my kids up.
And the irony was just so intense.
Because I remembered that when Baboo was a baby, she was on so many rounds of antibiotics because every time I took her in to the doctor she had signs of an ear infection. Whether she was in pain or not, whether she had a fever or not. Just look in the ear, see something red or bulgy, prescribe antibiotics. So many antibiotics.
When she was 7, I finally decided to just let the ear infections play out because a round of antibiotics lasted 7 to 10 days and letting the body take care of the infection was expected to last 7 to 10 days anyway. I was so frightened at first. But instead of giving her antibiotics adn sending her to school, I actually took care of her. She stayed home and I gave her a warm, moist compress on her ear. I increased her vitamins and supplemented with other things to support her immune systerm. She stayed home and rested. It took a couple days and she felt better. And despite the fact that she had a plethora of ear infections up until that point, she never had another ear infection after that.
And I stopped using antibiotics. So I would take a kid in and they’d get diagnosed with an ear infection. If I told the doctor that I’d just let their body heal it themselves, I’d get a big lecture on how devastating untreated ear infections could be and how it could lead to having ear drums rupture and even loss of hearing. The doctors would totally badger me and I actually felt very threatened. Threatened enough that I stopped saying what I was going to do and just started silently taking the prescription with no intention of filling it, but at least knowing enough to keep my mouth shut about it.
So there I was being told (ten years later) that the way I had chosen to treat ear infections was NOW agreed upon medically as the best course of action. Of course, this lady was much younger than I was and I’m guessing that her career didn’t span back as far as my experience. She probably thought that those in her profession had always been telling me to treat ear infections this way. She had no idea of my history with the treatment.
So I found it a little ironic as she was trying to convince me about vaccinations as if her profession new everything and just because they said it was safe and good now meant that they would always see it that way. And the undeserved condescension as if I didn’t know that I had been right about antibiotics the entire time.
sparkling blue 