I feel, as both a health care professional and a mom, that parents need to instill in their children that injections or medical procedures might hurt for a little while--and not sugar coat it, come right out and say that they hurt and for about how long--but their benefits out weigh the small amount of pain or discomfort they cause.
As a parent of a child with chronic medical issues, I seriously concur with this!
However, you'd be amazed at how hard it is to get the information out of doctors exactly what is going to happen, even pediatric doctors. The proper answer to, "What will you be doing? Please be specific so I can prepare him." isn't "Allergy testing.", it's "We have a round device with six points, we'll dip that into the allergen and then press that into the skin. We'll do this six times. He'll wait for twenty minutes in the waiting room and we'll see what the results are. Then, for each allergen he reacted to we'll take a tiny bit of the allergen in a hypodermic needle and inject it under the skin on the other forearm - we'll do this for each allergen that he reacts to. We may or may not need to do a blood draw - it will depend on the reactions he has."
If I tell my child what's going to happen, he has the right to have only that happen. Don't spring extra stuff on us, and it seriously pisses me off when I ASK for clarification and then they're shocked that I'm advocating for my child's right not to be traumatized. If it's a matter of something that's discovered and believed to be a danger to his health, ok, but just because the nurse doesn't think it's important to tell me that there's going to be a blood draw doesn't mean that I am going to force my child to go through it that day if he's been through quite enough already.
As a parent of a child with chronic medical issues, I seriously concur with this!
However, you'd be amazed at how hard it is to get the information out of doctors exactly what is going to happen, even pediatric doctors. The proper answer to, "What will you be doing? Please be specific so I can prepare him." isn't "Allergy testing.", it's "We have a round device with six points, we'll dip that into the allergen and then press that into the skin. We'll do this six times. He'll wait for twenty minutes in the waiting room and we'll see what the results are. Then, for each allergen he reacted to we'll take a tiny bit of the allergen in a hypodermic needle and inject it under the skin on the other forearm - we'll do this for each allergen that he reacts to. We may or may not need to do a blood draw - it will depend on the reactions he has."
If I tell my child what's going to happen, he has the right to have only that happen. Don't spring extra stuff on us, and it seriously pisses me off when I ASK for clarification and then they're shocked that I'm advocating for my child's right not to be traumatized. If it's a matter of something that's discovered and believed to be a danger to his health, ok, but just because the nurse doesn't think it's important to tell me that there's going to be a blood draw doesn't mean that I am going to force my child to go through it that day if he's been through quite enough already.
/soapbox ;)
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