Let's Talk About Risk

Don't you hate it when you meet someone who is anti-homeschooling? It's so tiring. You can provide mountains of evidence that your child is well-adjusted:

• Socialized. Check - child is frequently photographed hanging on large group of friends, constantly texting and going to parties.
• Intelligent. Check - child is 16 and has finished all lower division general ed at community college with a 3.8 GPA.
• Community-oriented. Check - child has held down two volunteer jobs for the last 3 years.
• Polite. Check - child greets people with handshake, makes eye contact, and can hold down a conversation.
• Egalitarian. Check - child has witnessed both mom and dad working during their childhood.
• Diverse. Check - child has participated in scouts, theatre, soccer, teeball, basketball, fencing, chess team, hiking club, dance classes, art classes, foreign language classes, band, symphony, museum guild, etc., etc...

But still . . . "I just don't believe in homeschooling." 

Ugh. 

Do you want college acceptance rates for homeschoolers? Nah. How about standardized test scores for homeschoolers? Nah. How about convicted felon rates among homeschoolers? Nah.

This is exactly what it's like when you meet someone who is anti-vaccination. 

Do you want CDC, NIH, or AMA recommendations? Nah. Do you want peer-reviewed PubMed articles on vaccination safety and effectiveness? Nah. Do you want the advice of a trusted friend who is also a registered nurse? Nah.

The difference here is that when my kids were little, I would come home from homeschool park days and study microbiology textbooks and take exams. Hard exams. All while I was homeschooling with you. On my shelf right now, I am looking at "Microbiology," "Pathophysiology," "Pharmacology," "Essentials of Pediatric Nursing," "Critical Care Nursing," and the "NCLEX-RN Study Guide" which I practically memorized to take my State Board Exam so I could get a license to practice my "voodoo witchcraft" that advocates vaccinations for the health of your child and states that I am a Registered Nurse with Multi-State Privileges. 

And I homeschooled right along side you all of the way. I breastfed with you. I shared granola with you. But I can no longer stay silent about this anti-vaccination madness. 

You have been getting away with not vaccinating because other people have been vaccinating. They have been vaccinating for YEARS now; it is not new. You have forgotten what a sick kid looks like. You need to take a PALS (Pediatric Advance Life Support) class with me and watch videos of toddlers in respiratory distress from Hib. You need to see kids in the Third World with deformed limbs from polio. You need to WAKE UP. Eradicating disease requires a collective. You have to be willing to say, "I will accept this vaccination, even if I don't understand the science behind it, because I want what's best for the greatest number of people." I'm telling you: I understand the science, and it's safe. I'm risking my license, my career, and my friendship with you to tell you that vaccines are safe.

So let's talk about risk. This morning (after getting mad at ignorance on the internet) I was thinking about all of the risks that we take as humans. There are so many things. Being alive is even a risk. For some reason, I was thinking about a time when I was sixteen and on a flight with my dad who has now passed away, and I miss him. We were flying from our home in Germany to Bucharest, and I was positively terrorized. There are some mountains, the Transylvanian Alps, I believe, that are actually part of the Carpathians, and you descend down over them on your way into Bucharest. Those mountains made for the bumpiest flight I have ever been on. It was absolutely horrible, and I still cite that flight as one of the worst I have ever taken. After landing, I was completely determined that I was not going home on a plane. We were visiting friends at the embassy there, and my poor parents had to endure their weird teenage daughter looking up train schedules and talking about plane crashes the whole week that we were there. Since they weren't budging on the train idea, I started planning my life there in Romania; I would meet a nice Romanian boy, get married, have a family, and hopefully my friends would come visit me there since I wasn't ever leaving. 

After many ultimatums, my parents were able to get me on my death flight home. My dad, who was an aerospace engineer, sat next to me and explained EVERY little thing going on with the plane. Every little noise. Every little part, right down to the hydraulics. I was particularly afraid of the hydraulics -- God knows what they did, but they seemed to be implicated in more than one plane crash. I didn't understand anything he was telling me. To this day, I don't really understand all of the science involved in our modern-day jets, but I accept and respect the people that dedicate their lives to studying aerospace safety, and I realize that I don't have that expertise. Sure, I can read all about plane crashes on the internet, but when I actually crunch the numbers I can see that flying is safe. 

Risk is all around us. It is a risk to fly. It is a risk to drive. It is a risk to turn your back on the predominant educational system in our country and do it yourself. And it is a risk to get a vaccine that you think is injecting "toxins" into your body when it is actually a simple way to expose antigens of a pathogen to produce antibodies that keep you well. Please, if you are a homeschooler that vaccinates, can you please stand up and be counted? I fear that there are so few of us in our community that we need to be more vocal. And to all of my "friends" that think they know more about vaccines than I do: maybe we're not really friends if you don't respect that I am BOTH a homeschooling parent and a nurse that has studied this subject extensively and cares deeply about your health.