speaking of my mom being anti-vaccine, tho, I have a story to share:

the story about horse tetanus. about how my mom thought tetanus came from horses.

so last year I suffered a bout of anemia so severe I had to go to the ER. they had to pump me full of 2 bags of blood — that’s 2 pints. they wanted to give me 3 but at that point I’d already been in the ER for 10 hours and it was past midnight.

this was my 1st time in a hospital in over a decade and my 3rd time in a hospital for my own care ever. my medical history is super spotty because my mom doesn’t trust conventional medicine (for some reasons that are understandable & for many others that are infuriating). I’m 28.

during this whole business the nurses kept asking me about my medical history and I realized I had absolutely no idea. I couldn’t remember whether or not I’d gotten vaccinated but my memory of my childhood is spotty at best and nonexistent in most places so I’d just assumed.

so I called my mom to ask her. she was cagey about it for a while before she admitted that, no, she’d never vaccinated me and she didn’t believe in it. I asked her, specifically: but what about tetanus? surely she at least got me a tetanus shot.

NOPE.

she said, and I quote, “but I wasn’t worried about it because you only get tetanus from horses.”

I left that conversation feeling sort of out of my head and like everything was very surreal and weird for a couple of reasons:

1 I’d never heard about tetanus being related to horses and even after some extensive googling I could t find any link between horses and tetanus

2 I WAS A HORSE GIRL GROWING UP. I ROSE HORSES. FED THEM. BRUSHED THEM. CLEANED UP AFTER THEM. IF SHE THOUGHT TETANUS CAME FROM HORSES AND I WAS SPENDING MY ENTIRE SUMMER SURROUNDED BY THEM. MAYBE. A TETANUS SHOT. WOULD HAVE BEEN A GOOD IDEA.

so I leave this conversation feeling weird and decide to call my brother, who is finishing his masters in septic engineering. I tell him about this whole horse tetanus business and he’s thoroughly stumped and he tells me that actually tetanus doesn’t come from screws or nails-

it’s in the solid. but a screw is the perfect vehicle for tetanus because it has a large surface area and a sharp point that can break thru the skin and get into the bloodstream and then voila: tetanus.

I spend a few weeks stewing in my resentment towards my mom & exhaustion over nearly dying but every now & then that thought - “horse tetanus” - niggles at the back of my brain. how the ever loving fuck did my mom ever think that tetanus came from horses.

so, finally, I call her

it’s important here to know that my mom spent some time working as a midwife. I have no doubt that she did a lot of good. there are tons of women who find her even now, 40 years later, to thank her for helping them take back their bodily autonomy, to get abortions when they were-

-needed but not legal, to help them thru labor. I don’t want this thread to discredit the way she has don a lot of good and helped a lot of people. she is a kind and strong woman who has seen more pain than I will ever know and spent her life doing her best not to pass it on.

anyway, she tells me that when she was a midwife there were stories about births in small towns, before they had access to better tools, where the umbilical cord would be severed with a horse hair (like cutting clay with a wire) & many of those babies ended up getting tetanus.

so: horse hair, tetanus. clearly tetanus comes from horses. the correlation seems clear and finally it makes sense why she thinks this: even tho it’s very much wrong.

the tetanus is in the soil or manure. horses aren’t exactly sterile. the soil gets on the horse hair, which cuts the cord, and infects the blood stream and... boom.

usually the punchline of this story is that she never got me a tetanus shot because she thought tetanus came from horses but I was a horse girl growing up. I actually confronted her about this later and she seemed genuinely surprised, as if those 2 thoughts had never met before.

and I think that, plus the way the idea of “horse tetanus” even came to be a thing, says a lot about that sort of thinking. about having the facts but not the reason and not bothering to or knowing how to extrapolate the next logical progression of your beliefs.

1 more thing - this isn’t directly related but in Texas (and other places) you can fill out paperwork to have your child exempt from vaccination requirements, which is how my mom got me and my brothers thru school without vaccinating us.

my dad & stepmom are retired high school teachers (they taught at my high school) & when I told them about this horse tetanus BS my stepmom thoroughly chewed out my dad for letting my mom not vaccinate us when, as a public school teacher, he should have known better.

honestly my dad has no spine so idk what my stepmom was expecting but seeing the full force of her incredulous indignation was pretty vindicating for me, at least.

anyway I don’t really have a good wrap up for this thread (oops) but i sure wish there were any way at all to convince my mom vaccines are good, actually, but my brothers and I sure have tried and it sure ain’t worked and at this point my mom is 65 so....