Flu shot ordeal

After being told that the flu shot was PERFECTLY SAFE... the exact words of our pediatrician we decided after 6 months of hounding by the ped's office we reluctantly gave Avery the flu shot to ward off possible flu due to her upcoming surgery....... WRONG decision. I did not listen to my Mothers intuition.. I just new I should not give her that shot and I was right. I only gave it to her b/c the peds office scares a mother into it... "Ya know... she is going to be in the hospital at the worst time of the year...."

Well, it turned out that the Peds office didn't do their homework on my daughter BEFORE they gave her the shot... Avery is HIGHLY allergic to EGGS... Eggs are in the shot. All peds have to do is to test for this before the blankly put eggs into a body of a little one with no way to get the eggs out.

In the end we endured, 6 plus weeks of rashes, sickness, vomiting, wheezing that would not go away with the nebulizer- All this from a kid who never had a rash or any allergies that we knew of BEFORE this shot.. Every was eating all sorts of stuff that never bothered her. Even stuff with eggs and wheat.

She now has to stay away from all EGGS, WHEAT, SOY, NUTS, SHELLFISH.

The worst of it too was that Avery began to have behavior changes and staring episodes that scared me to death.. She would leave what we were doing and stare for like 2 minutes and we could not rouse her. She has since recovered.

I have learned a lot about vaccinations, and antibiotics/vaccination combination since this ordeal. I have a new found respect for parents who say that something in a vaccination did harm their child. I now cannot vaccinate Avery for the MMR and maybe no future vaccinations.

They say the percentage of harm from a vaccine is small, but hey... when it's you it's 100%.

We will chance the measles, which are highly recoverable vs the chance that a vaccination will harm our child's brain. Autism. When children have a chance of 1 in 130 getting a diagnosis of Autism and you have thousands of parents tell the medical community what they are seeing and nobody listens.

I do believe that the combo of Avery's allergy and her prior antibiotic use prior to the shot caused her to have such problems.

It's funny how your peds office is there for you when you do what they say... but when there is a problem they hide. We wrote letters, told the peds office that we were here to stay and that we did not want to pushed off to other doctors, we asked them to file a VAERS form, they did and we also asked they to acknowledge that this shot caused these problems. We wrote the whole staff a letter and asked them to change their policy to telling parents it's completely safe and to test for egg allergies in children before they inject them with this shot.

In the end her doctor say that the rashes could be unrelated, that her allergies might have come out anyway, and that there are not studies to indicate such problems from the flu shot.. I told them to study Avery and that there are tons more people just like her... We are not really studying people like her b/c if we did... What would that do to the Flu Shot/ Pharma industry.

People would actually be able to think for themselves. Know the risks, get all the info before you take the chance in vaccinations.

I have inoculated all my kids prior to Avery, but on a modified schedule. Looking back the chicken pox shot is probably the reason our oldest got Pneumonia when she was 3- a complication of the chickenpox shot. I would also say that her Asthma and allergies could maybe also be a result of too many antibiotic and her vaccinations.

I am not saying that people should not vaccinate at all, I just want people to know that maybe they can don't have to get all the shots and maybe you can wait before you inoculate your little baby with something they have no chance of getting until they are older...

I was recently told that vaccinations are a way to keep populations disease free, but they are not safe for the individual. They may keep outbreaks at bay or even knock them out, but at what risk to the individual. All I am asking is let the parent decide if the risk of damage is worth the risk of a childhood illness.