Just the vacs, ma'am

Woody is doing very well again. It does look like they are going to put off his extubation attempt until late next week, however, because of his vaccines.

It came as quite a surprise when we got told that Woody needed to be vaccinated, because while it is normal for a two month old baby to get vaccines, Woody is hardly a normal two month old baby (I mean, we still calculate his age in gestational weeks, and considering that he is just now at 31 weeks 4 days, that seems pretty young). Our second surprise was in which vaccines they wanted to give him. In addition to the DPT and the HIB and the polio, which are fairly normal, there was also Hepatitis B, which doesn't exactly seem like something he's at a high risk of developing (they gave us a brochure that indicated that risk categories included intravenous drug users with shared needles and promiscuous sodomites)

But, as I figured, it was probably best to get all of them, because let us not forget that while certain conspiracy theorists believe that vaccines cause autism (which I will note that numerous studies show that there is no evidence of this claim) they actually prevent massive amounts of disease and suffering, and I have no interest in causing young Woody any more suffering that he has to already have. On the other hand, I remember last year when I got a tetanus booster right before going turkey hunting, I was sore for a good two weeks after that, so I bet he is not very happy with it either.

I suppose this is as good a time as any to say what we're planning on doing when it comes to the circumcision question. Woody will have, as noted, surgery on his hernias either right before or right after going home from the hospital, and the nurses pointed out that since he's going to be under general anesthesia that is a great time to get the circ done. Except for the minor problem that there's really no good reason to do one. Circumcision has, yes, shown some positive benefits in places like Africa that have high rates of heterosexual AIDS transmission; it tends to reduce the risk of men picking it up from their partners. There have been some findings of increased rates of urinary tract infections (UTIs) in kids without. But weighed against these two dubious benefits* is the fact that getting a circumcision done is itself a lingering pain for a guy who's had pain for his whole life up until now, and is an elective surgery that can have negative consequences for his later sex life, done at a time that he cannot consent or have any say in the whole process. I also suspect that much of the pressure to do circumcisions has to do with the fact that most men here (the US generally, and the upper Midwest, specifically, where the rate of infant circumcision remains the highest) were circumcised and the need to come up with reasons to justify it to make it not seem like we were unnecessarily mutilated.

I decline to perpetuate that particular pattern. Woody shall remain uncut unless he gets older and decides he wants to do it himself.

*I say dubious because each has a non-circumcision alternative; for AIDS condoms work better. For UTIs research shows that teaching the kid to clean under the foreskin works at least as well. There is no medical reason to do general circumcisions, and the risk of one of the rare conditions that indicate therapeutic circumcisions is not great enough to justify it.