I have to say just prior to me having it done my, I used to visit my granny quite a lot, well, every week, and she said that when she had her children i.e. my mum and my aunties and uncles they, immunisation wasn’t available. And she said when her youngest daughter, my mum’s youngest sibling was born, some vaccines began to be available. And she said the queue of women just queuing up to get their babies done, you know, she said they were going in the clinic and out with their babies because they had all witnessed at that time babies dying or being terribly ill and having long, life lasting effects of illnesses. And so it was an amazing opportunity for them. So she was sort of guiding me that way also because she had experienced both with immunisation and it not being available, and also seeing her children suffer as a result of the illnesses.

Quite a lot of influence really. When I did my survey lots of people said, ‘Oh, I give immunisation because my mother did. My mother gave me, and I give my children. Yes, they just follow on. It’s a family tradition. Because Jewish religion is based on tradition. And it’s also our way of thinking really that everything that we do, I mean there are people who are called returnees, who are coming from a totally secular Jewish background, who have just found their roots as an adult, and that’s one set of the community. But, somebody like me, who’s Orthodox Jewish from birth, most of how I run my life is what my parents taught me and how I’ve seen in their house. So I guess immunisation is just another part of that structure.

I talked to dad and various doctor friends that he had and asked what they’d done with their children and grandchildren. I wanted to know very much people who had given their children the jab and who had been fine, particularly medical people who’d given their children the jab and it had been fine. So I suppose in a way I was geared towards finding people who’d had it and it had been all right, because I did want to be able to go and have it done. But I just needed some support for it.

But I was also aware that they had a government slant, that the government was very much pushing for it. And therefore I wanted to talk to them as a friend, on a friendly basis as to what they would do with their own children rather than just what the line was from the government. And fortunately there were a lot around that were saying, ‘Well absolutely immunise, and the MMR’s fine and it to our knowledge is safe.

But one friend in particular who is, who is very into an alternative lifestyle, she decided to have all three of her girls, shes got three girls under six and they’ve all been vaccinated, given the MMR. And I was quite surprised and I talked at length with her about it and came away feeling well, you know, she is someone whose opinions I respect, whose lifestyle I respect although I couldn’t live like that myself and shes done, did a lot of research into it and has decided that it’s a good thing to do. And she did have a big influence on my decision as well.

I went away and spoke to, I didn’t really know what to do. So I spoke to a friend from university who’s a GP, who’s got two children. And she was really, really helpful. She first of all, she told me the fact that any severe reactions, such as anaphylactic shock, which is what I was very concerned about, would happen very quickly.

One of the things that had been mentioned to me when I went to the hospital was that I could get the immunisations in a hospital setting. But it would be done at twelve and I’d be sent home about eight. And because there was an eleven hours delay before the reaction happened last time, I thought, ‘Well, I can stay at the hospital for eight hours, but that’s not really going to help me, if shes going to have an reaction at two oclock in the morning. So the fact, it was very reassuring to know that any severe reaction would happen very quickly, so at least I would be in hospital, if that happened. The other thing she said was the fact that I should go back to my GP and ask for a second opinion, because obviously I wasn’t satisfied with the information that I’d got so far. And that I should actually ask to speak to someone who’s a specialist, a paediatric immunologist. So I went back to my GP and he was extremely helpful. And he did give me the number of a paediatric immunologist.

And it’s funny because you do trust the opinions of your friends. Luckily for me I worked for a lady in Germany whose son was a little older than our daughter and she thoroughly researched all of it and it was her that made me aware that the initial study which linked MMR with autism was only actually linked to four, to four, twelve children sorry. And that made me question it then because I had assumed it had been a much bigger thing than that. And also I was lazy in a way, I was frightened to look on the internet because you put in anything medical on the internet and you tend to get all sorts of shock and scare things come up and I thought that would probably do me more harm than good and confuse me more than I was already. So I was content to accept my boss’s opinions because I respected her as an individual anyway, so slightly lazy perhaps but certainly easy to go along with somebody else, somebody elses decision.