Nawaz: Children’s vaccination is cause for celebration, even if there are tears

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One day at breakfast my daughter suddenly said, “When the virus is gone, can we go to a hockey game?”

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“Yes absolutely.”

I’m still grateful for every outing I made before COVID – a game of Habs and Frozen 2 at the movies seem to occupy a particularly important place in her memory.

“When the virus is gone…” has become a familiar saying of my daughter for the past 20 months. I have not yet told you about the growing consensus that the virus may never go away. Instead, I have tried replacing it with “Once everyone is vaccinated …”

But talking about vaccination prompted a new statement: “I don’t want to. I’m afraid.”

She has been shy since last year’s flu shot hurt her arm for a day or two. I reminded him: “Once you get it, you can play at your friends’ houses without masks.” That got his attention. I also advised him: “Just don’t look. You will hardly feel it, and then it will be over. “Strongly in favor of vaccines, he wasn’t sure how much air time he should spend on his fears. Was it better to validate or downplay it? Are you trying to explain herd immunity?

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When I saw on Twitter that the Clic Santé portal was open before the announcement of approval of the Legault vaccine for those under 12 years of age, I navigated to the page at lightning speed. The Palais des congrès had appointments the next morning. When I booked our 8:30 am slot, my hands were shaking. This was the moment he had been anxiously waiting for months: crawling every headline, reading every news story. This was my personal threshold to return to something like normal life. Although attending hockey games or the movies has been allowed for quite some time in Quebec, I would not consider it before our family was fully vaccinated.

We were among the first group to arrive at the Palais the next day. News trucks were parked outside. The site itself was designed for kids: bookmarks decorated with animal stickers, hunt-and-hunt puzzles for fun, and stickers for rewards. Aside from asking the staff to dress up as cartoon characters, I couldn’t have asked for more. It was wonderful. But I noticed that my daughter was starting to get cold feet.

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A journalist who was nearby asked me if I cared if they received pictures of his vaccination. “Okay,” I said, distracted as I tried to help my daughter shed the extra layers of winter clothing. After all, she had wanted to talk to everyone with a video camera that we had passed when entering. But suddenly I was tugging at her coat as she tried to put it back on, the two well-meaning nurses intervened. with suggestions, and we were all talking to her at the same time.

My daughter, mugged from all sides, started to panic.

I put her on my lap, but before I could draw her attention to the congestion we had brought, she saw a needle and began to scream at the top of her lungs, a soul-shaking sound, only appropriate for an attempted kidnapping … or vivisection.

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No matter what the cause, there is a special kind of out-of-body shame parents feel during a public meltdown, accompanied by the suspicion that everyone is watching. Usually the feeling is worse than the reality. But when I looked over my shoulder, I saw that we were in the center of an ad hoc semicircle of giant cameras manned by at least a dozen journalists; it felt like they were a hundred. My own panic began to mount. This didn’t feel like the happy moment he had been waiting for so long.

Finally, one of the nurses managed to communicate that the shooting had ended. Neither my daughter nor I had noticed. Instantly he stopped screaming.

In response to the screams from hell, they brought in an adorable therapy dog ​​and the handler offered to let my daughter push the cart. The cameras followed her, snapping photos as she gave the dog treats, while I stood there, blind, picking up the scattered winter clothes and taking the vaccination record from the stunned nurse.

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As we were leaving, my daughter chatted happily about the stickers she had been given. I bought him a donut on the way home, forgetting, to my relief, that reward donuts should probably be reserved for the non-yelling.

My husband and I opened a bottle of champagne that night. The day had not gone as expected, but our daughter’s vaccination was still cause for celebration. Having the moment captured on film felt like a strange but appropriate reflection of how much the event really made headlines for us, perhaps even the beginning of a new phase of pandemic life.

And thankfully most of the media chose the cute therapy dog ​​photos.

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