I took Vihaan to get his Hepatitis B shot today. We still consult the Paediatrician who attended his delivery at the same hospital he was born in. This is reasonably convenient except that we get caught in peak office hour traffic in the mornings. The alternative would be to consult him at his clinic in the evenings. I still brave the traffic and go to the hospital because Vihaan has always been scheduled for a vaccination at each of his visits. Now, here is a trade secret. Big hospitals with a busy paediatric department administer a lot of injections in a day, so think of it as a restaurant with a high turnover. Automatically their injections are not stored for too long as they are used up continuously. When getting your shots administered at a private clinic it is possible the vaccines may have been in storage for a while. Some injections are available in multiple user vials, that is once opened they can be used for multiple injections. These especially may be dangerous if they have been stored after they have been opened, for lack of sufficient number of patients on the same day.
I like going to the hospital with Vihaan because it provides me with a visual confirmation of how much he has grown since we first started going there.
So at our initial visit he was among the smallest babies in the waiting room except the premies. Then gradually month by month I started seeing more babies his size until today when he seemed to be among the bigger ones. The little sleeping wrinkled faces with the tiny clenched fists gave me a pang because Vihaans tiny baby phase already seems so distant. Meanwhile Vihaan was on his best social behaviour- jumping, squawking and wriggling at all the entertaining babies and bright lights. The hospital visits also let me know how well we are keeping up with current baby fashion. I get pretty jealous if I see a kid in a smarter outfit or a nicer stroller. Also it enables me check out the other mothers to see how well I am faring on the post partum weight loss game ( Not too well, my current regimen consists of eating cheesecake and muttering under my breath when I see Padma Lakshmi in yet another bikini ). I sure as hell am not going to look like that at one year post partum, above or below the neck.
I am eternally grateful that babies have the attention span of a fish because that means Vihaan cries for about 3 seconds after an injection before getting distracted by something and going back to normal smiling mode.
