airport x-ray scanners and pregnancy

Did anyone hear the recent NPR report on concerns about airport x-ray scanners – the kind where you put your arms up and it takes a full shot of your body while exposing you to up to six seconds of x-ray radiation? It’s making me not want to go through them, especially when pregnant. Nor do I want my child to go through it.

The TSA says its optional and parents can choose to not have their children go through screening. However, my sense is that choosing the pat-down is not just a matter of making a choice. It comes across to me as more of a punishment – incurring either humiliation or a significant delay with an already long line.

We’ll see how the choice works soon, because I think I prefer to avoid exposure for my unborn child and my child, if not for myself. Those who say it’s safe compare it to the radiation received through flight – which is a matter of concern. But if I’m already receiving a potentially troubling amount of radiation during my flight, do I really want any more? No.

And how do they know it’s safe without long-term studies? It takes a while for chromosomes to be damaged and for cancer to occur. These machines have just appeared. It seems hard to be assured that results are not going to appear decades later for frequent travelers.

Worrying about this also makes me want to cut back on airline travel while pregnant. But so far, I have two trips to the Midwest, one to Europe and one to Africa planned. Hopefully that will be it.
Are you concerned about these machines? Why or why not? Do you plan to go through them? If you’ve opted out, how did it go?

Reminding ourselves that we could do it too

When I read a news piece several months ago about a father who forgot to drop his child off at daycare, leaving it to die in his car while he worked, it haunted me. How horrible to be responsible for the death of one’s own child. Even if it’s inadvertent. How in the world does the spouse cope? How does the parent go on? It seems such a silly way to go.

But still, even then, it scared me. It scared me because I thought my husband could do it. He occasionally forgets where he is going when he’s driving. It would be just as possible to forget a quiet, sleeping baby.

Since River was born, I’ve also worried about my own ability to forget. It helps a lot that I’m not working, that we both have reasonable stress levels, that we don’t shuttle River around very often. But still, you never know.

This article is one of the best written and most powerful news pieces I have read in a while. Read it to remember your own fallibility, to not rush to judgment, to think about how to protect your own children before an inadvertent mistake causes such tragedy.

Mom's separation anxiety

I’ve been absent from the blogsphere for the past week or so. Suddenly, there is a lot going on that is keeping me very occupied. All in a short period of time we’ve had a death in the family, an exciting professional development, an opportunity to interview for my dream job and planning a major trip.

I’m going to Siberia for three weeks soon and after much deliberation, I’ve decided to leave River home. That’s probably best for his welfare. However, I’m having my own emotional meltdown about leaving him for so long at this age. I feel deceitful in that I can’t tell him or prepare him ahead of time. I feel like each time we spend time together, I’m trying to rack up quality time for the time that I miss. I’m worried that unlike when I went out of town when he was younger, this time he’s going to remember me and miss me. I worry that he can’t verbalize his concerns, nor can he understand when people explain. I’m afraid he’ll feel abandoned and that he’ll lose trust in me.

My original plan was to take him, in which case he would have been away from Mark for three weeks. I don’t think Mark would have worried much about these things. He probably would have enjoyed the quiet time. Nor do I really think River would have suffered too much without seeing his father for a few weeks.

So does that mean I believe there is a fundamental difference between mothers and fathers and that mothers are somehow more important? Wouldn’t that go against my beliefs in feminism and co-parenting?

Perhaps there is a difference. Maybe there is some type of chemical connection that happens with birth. Maybe there is meant to be a special biological bond between mother and child. Or it might be only that in our case, I spend more hours per week with River than Mark does. While Mark does a lot with River, I am the one who is usually thinking ahead and planning for River’s needs. Maybe I’m overestimating myself, as I think mothers are prone to do, in thinking that without my planning, his world will fall apart. I know it won’t and I know that our babysitter and Mark will love and care for him.

In any case, he darn well better start walking before I go. He’s got just under a month to take that first step and I need him to do so. If I miss that big milestone, I’m really going to become a psychological case.

To add to my meltdown, I just finished watching a 20/20 show on how to survive a catastrophe. A survivor of a horrendous plane crash recounted an 18-month old seated in front of him, who had been playing peek a boo with him, and ending up dying. That boy has haunted this survivor for 20 years. I am terrified of putting River into a situation like that in which he is in danger and there is nothing I can do to save him.

I’m not a big stickler for safety. I think certain rules, like carseats, are good to strive for, but shouldn’t always be mandatory. There are some circumstances, such as a baby who nurses 2-4 hours at a shot, or going out of town when it’s not feasible to lug along the carseats, in which I think it’s reasonable to skip the seats.

I generally think the same thing about baby seats on airlines – useful, but a hassle and the odds of needing them are small. Still, when the domestic flight we took in Panama shook so much in the wind that some people screamed and the woman next to me held my hand, I realized that in case of a crash or a fall, River would be the first one to hit the ceiling and probably the most likely to be injured. It’s not possible to hold tight to an infant and to assume the safest crash landing posture. And the airplane seatbelts don’t hold a small child securely (which I’d guess is what killed the 18 month old).

So now I’m finding myself thinking that I will take a carseat along on flights when practical. If I go completely overboard, I’ll follow the advice of another passenger who survived and dress him in 100 percent natural fibers, so that in the one in a billion or so chance we go down in a fiery crash, he’ll reduce his chances of being burned.

Overall, I think I’m just going through a period of anxiety in which I recognize that nothing I do can protect him fully. The more time we spend together, the more investment I put into his growth and development, the more he becomes a person, the more frightened I become of something taking that away.

I think I need to start doing more meditation or somehow find myself some more zen. I want to be like the Buddhists and appreciate River’s presence right now, appreciate all he has already done for me and for others, and treat all joy we might receive in the future as a gift rather than an expectation. I’m trying, but it’s not happening.

Are there others out there who aren’t generally anxious about their children, but have occasional anxiety spells like this come over them? If so, how do you cope with them?

Our Vaccine Compromise

I admit that when River was first born, I didn’t think too much about the vaccines. Despite the controversy, I figured I’d gone through the schedule just fine and I expected we’d follow the recommended guidelines. So we did the Hep B shot at birth. And we did the 2-month-old series.

To my surprise, the day he got the five shots at two months old was the worst day of his life so far. At the time of the shots, his cries mixed with fear, shock and surprise as he was priced not once, but again and again and again, as if to ask, how could you do this to me? That afternoon, he cried inconsolably. Even a pediatric nurse who was helping us out was unable to settle him. He needed infant Tylenol, but lots of love and soothing. At that point, I began to research vaccines.

I found most of the information I found online to be biased somehow. The anti-vaccine people seem to like to scare parents. And the pro-vaccine people like to scare parents the other way.

I found The Vaccine Book, by Dr. Sears, to be a pretty balanced account. I appreciated the great detail it went into on each vaccine. And I appreciated that different schedules were provided based on parent’s concern.

Based on my readings and discussions I had with researchers at the University of North Carolina, I felt that the risk most likely didn’t come from any particular vaccine, but from putting so many vaccines at once into such an immature immune system.

Given that my husband is strongly pro-vaccine, that I travel a lot and therefore have more exposure to various illnesses (and wanted to be able to bring River with me) and that I had concerns about the number of vaccines given, this is the compromise agreement we reached·:

• We give only vaccine at a time, spaced out in the time before the next round begins. We did them one at a time so I could see which ones bothered him. If time, distance or the co-pays were an issue, I’d do two at a time, with no more than one live virus given at once. But since we live ear the doctors, have the time, and can afford the $15 co-pay, we’ll stay with one at a time as long as it’s practical.
• We give two doses of infant vitamin C (I originally bought it at Whole Foods, but found it cheaper at http://www.vitacost.com/) on the day before, the day of, and the day after a vaccine.
• River receives breastmilk prior to and immediately after receiving a vaccine.

Some say that getting so many shots individually increases the amount the baby
cries overall. This hasn’t been true for us. He receives some shots without crying at all. For others he cries a matter of seconds. I think the heavy crying at his two month shots was due not so much to the pain, but to the surprise that we’d allow him to be hurt again and again.

Every family will come up with the plan that works for them. For us, this plan has provided a good balance between protection from disease and minimizing the risks of vaccines.