I am a little bit fed up these days of seeing so much anti-vaccination stuff clogging my Facebook timeline. It's actually only a minority that think this way, yet they push and shove to tell people how much they hate vaccinations. To be clear, I am for vaccination, but not militant, but now I feel I have to almost constantly defend my choice. I never spoke of it before, because why do I need to tell everyone about it? It's a quiet choice I made in my own mind, yet anti-vac people will go around telling anyone who will listen that their children are unvaccinated, and probably wish their parents had not vaccinated them either. It's like vegetarians. Some of them are ok, and just get on with not eating meat, but then there are those who attack your choice to eat meat. Why? I do not go around saying you should eat meat and list the reasons why, no, I simply get on with my choice. I made that choice so I shouldn't push it on other people, as it might not be right for them.
I would never dream of forcing vaccination on someone, but they must consider that I went through the same pro/con research as them. I am not stupid and I read up about a lot of choices I make in my life. I don't want to go into anything unprepared if I can help it. To wrongly assume that pro-vac people haven't made an informed decision is foolish. In fact anyone who chooses something without knowing everything possible about it, makes a foolish choice. At least if you do your research you can safely say you made that choice with as much information as possible. I do this for everything, even down to buying a video game. If I don't know it well, I will read reviews, if an odd one mentions any kind of bug or glitch that may happen, I take it into account but realise that weighed up with all the other reviews, its most likely a more rare occurrence and only a few will come across it. Don't get me wrong, I am not saying the people who suffer any rare effects of anything are not to be counted, but rather it just shows that the percentage is low. Don't we take a risk every time we drive somewhere? Walk somewhere? Go to work? We don't know when injury or death could occur. We take safety precautions as best we can, but still, we don't know for sure. I have heard of a few children getting knocked over by cars on my street, but it doesn't stop me crossing the road.
We even have things in our life that happen to us without warning, and there's nothing we can do about it. Once upon a time that used to scare me, as I sat comfortably (as one can be!) watching medical documentaries and being thankful that I had not yet needed surgery in my life, and hopefully never would! Yet at the age of 19 I developed appendicitis and became very ill, later discovering that my appendix had burst and required not only surgery, but a full cut and not keyhole as one would hope. I feel it made me stronger though. I had an image in my mind of what surgery would be like, and I surprised myself by being calm and listening to the doctors, nurses, my surgeon and the anesthetist. (not blindly you must understand, but I was in a state where surgery was my best and only option, and doctors know better than I do, having studied for years in their field!) To be honest, I think most people in that position would have just gone with the flow because when you are in severe pain (my sheet said I was given morphine at one point, and then I was put on tramadol, a very strong painkiller that made me fall asleep when given it) you will do anything to get rid of that pain. I never knew severe pain until that point, and haven't felt it since. It's not something you can imagine, as you can see from my previous bliss before the surgery!
My conclusion is that life comes with hurdles, the good and the bad, the highs and the lows. The choices we make can either help or hinder us in this path. I have no ill feeling towards anti-vaccination or vegetarians, but I do wish they would consider other people's opinions and that you can't tell someone they are wrong because of a choice they made. Leave them to it, concentrate on your own life and you will feel better about it. I never thought about anti-vac people before and I was fine. Of course I knew they existed, but I never felt I needed to verbally attack them. Let's be kind to one another and respect each others' life choices!
