Today, we brought Darius to a nearby clinic intending to do his injection. We have previously called up the clinic when Darius was one month old and the receptionist told us to only drop by the clinic for the injection when he’s 6-week old, as we wanted to take up their 6-in-1 package.

And so we went down in the morning and arrived 45 minutes before their closing time. Darius was sleeping soundly in Cat’s arms, wearing a slightly over-sized cap.

When it was our turn to see the doctor however, Darius started waking up and I was a little worried if he would become cranky during the injection and examination.

After entering the consultation room, the doctor informed us that we should only be doing the injection when Darius is 2 months old, unlike what the receptionist told us. There must have been some miscommunication. Anyway, we will just let the doctor do an examination on him instead.

First of all, he will need to take Darius’ measurements, such as weight, height and head circumference. This was where Darius started to gett cranky.

The moment we placed Darius on the weighing scale, he started crying badly, as he had often disliked being placed down from our embrace. (or maybe the scale was too cold for his legs) We had to try our best to soothe him, although it wasn’t very successful. The pacifier didn’t work either and he kept spitting it out.

Cat and I took turns to carry and soothe him, and it only helped a little. The doctor then proceeded to measure his height and head circumference, soothing him with kind words along the way. He has two children himself, the second only 3 weeks old, so he’s fatherly in nature too.

While Darius was still crying, the doctor continued with the checking of his heart with his stethoscope. As he undressed Darius slightly, Darius started crying loudly again. He also disliked being undressed.

Before proceeding to check inside his mouth, the doctor jokingly said, “Good boy, this makes things easy; I don’t even have to ask you to open your mouth.” Darius was so engrossed in his crying that his mouth was hardly closed at all.

There were then examinations of his eyes, genitals, grasping reflex etc, and we were glad everything turned out to be normal. In fact, the doctor was pleasantly surprised that Darius could already hold his head quite well at his age.

After the examination, we also enquired about the pneumococcal and rotavirus vaccines. For the former, the doctor suggested us to do it only after Darius is at least 2 years of age, as it’s cheaper. More importantly, there is not much urgency to do it early as in East Asia, there is very minimal risk of the child getting infected with Pneumonia. The risks only increase when he enters pre-school and gets in touch with more people.

As for the rotavirus vaccine, we will only need to give him his first oral dose when he’s six months of age. There will be a total of two doses.

With that, we ended Darius’ consultation and by then, Darius had already started to simmer down.

We will be coming back in another two weeks’ time for his 6-in-1 injection. Wonder how Darius will react to it then.

Other patients in the clinic who overheard Darius’ loud crying must have thought it was because of the pain he suffered for his injection when in reality, nothing invasive was done on him at all. Ha…

Here’s Darius’ Stats at 6 weeks old:

Weight: 5.0 kg (50 percentile)

Height: 57 cm (50 percentile)

Head Circumference: 40 cm (75 percentile)

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