Baby clinic today, and for once it is blessedly quiet. I guess everybody is away on holiday, or at least found something more interesting to do than hang around in the doctor's surgery for hours on end.
Giving the MMR jab to one 13 month old, there were no tears per se, but the little cherub fixed me with such a look of hurt and outrage I felt genuinely ashamed of my inhuman brutality. Sorry baby!
I gave mum my usual spiel at such moments: that the baby clinic is the most emotionally wearing of all the clinics I do, but also the one I walk away from with the biggest sense of satisfaction at a job well done; that I have made a real difference in the lives of these children by protecting them from a range of horrible, killing diseases, diseases that until late into the last century cut terrible swathes through the population, but are now next to vanished. For instance, in 1988, the year that immunisation against meningitis type C was introduced, there were several hundred cases in Britain and scores died. 15 years later: zero cases, zero deaths.
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