Callista wrote:
Here's that all-caps annoyingness edited so you can read it properly.
Quote:
I watched the episode from the standpoint of a nurse as well as a mother of a vaccine injured son. Our son was injured by the DPT vaccine and now is 17 and seizures plaque our lives. He was born healthy and now can not sit fed himself and is the size of a 5 year old. The decision to have another child was very hard but we have a daughter. The is 8 and has not been vaccinated and we do fear that she will get one of these diseases but more afraid that she will have a reaction as her brother did. Either way it is our chose to make not the doctors not the government ours. Put yourself in our shoes for just one second. The doctors can not tell us why our son reacted nor can they assure us she wont. She is very healthy has only been to the dr. three times her whole life. Her laughter brings us so much joy and when she says mama or daddy it is still music to our ears. To give her something that could hurt her is not a chance we are willing to take. What would you do?
OK. I had a bad reaction to the MMR; a high fever and a benign seizure. I was autistic before that, and autistic afterwards; my babyhood was full of things like constantly needing to be rocked, not sleeping through the night until age five, etc. I am fully vaccinated. I have two younger sisters. The middle sister was vaccinated and is not autistic. The youngest sister is completely unvaccinated and is autistic just like me, with a touchy digestive system on top of it.
Your son's autism was almost certainly unrelated to his vaccinations; autism becomes evident at the same time as many childhood vaccinations, and many people confuse coincidence with an actual cause. It makes more sense to me that your son's epilepsy caused stress on his system and made his autism much more obvious. If a fever after a vaccine hadn't triggered it, getting the flu and the resultant high fever would certainly have done it. Regressing after the onset of severe epilepsy is very common and happens among non-autistic children, too. Your daughter would not have been autistic even if you had vaccinated her... There is no evidence for any link between vaccination and autism.
Yeah, I mean when I was about three and a half I had an allergic reaction to penicillin that made my (already observed, yet not acknowledged as such) autistic traits stand out more, as well as being in a great deal of physical discomfort. I also black out at 70-90% of the times a needles goes in, whether it's for a vaccination or blood draw (sometimes it progresses to a seizure and sometimes it's just fainting).
However, just because I stopped speaking for about a week from the stress of it and I still was only echolalic in speech (as I had been before the incident), doesn't mean that I'm going to start on a campaign about penicillin causing autism - especially since there are many subtle signs that my parents missed beforehand, but which after my diagnosis (a number of years later) I realized were part and parcel of my being autistic).
_________________
"There are things you need not know of, though you live and die in vain,
There are souls more sick of pleasure than you are sick of pain"
--G. K. Chesterton, The Aristocrat
08 Jan 2009, 11:20 pm
