iOS app Android app More

Meredith Lopez


Vaccines Against Terrorism

Posted: 06/11/09 11:31 AM ET

I am through the looking glass, people.

I have discovered a deep, dark secret of the utmost importance to our national security. This secret goes far beyond the Pentagon, the White House, the CIA, the FBI, or the PTA. It is so devastating to our great nation that I risk life and limb to myself and my family by posting about it here, but you, the public, have a right to know.

I am talking, people, about children's medical records.

Shhhhh! For god's sake, don't say it out loud! They are listening.

And who are "They?"

"They" are my baby son's former pediatrician's office. I said shhhhhhh!

Six weeks before we moved from Manhattan's Upper East Side to Brooklyn's Park Slope, I hand delivered to the old pediatrician a signed letter of authorization stating that I needed the Juban Princeling's medical records sent to his new pediatrician. The new Brooklyn office would not put us in their system or give us an appointment until they had his records.

By this point I had already spent hours online looking for a reliable and well-reviewed pediatrician's office near our new digs. I needed a place that was within a 10-minute walking distance so that if the Princeling got sick I would not have to schlep the poor coughing, sneezing baby on the subway or a bus. You New Yorkers know what I'm talking about. Anytime any of us are on public transportation and someone coughs or sneezes, we are all obligated, under the Unspoken Rules of New Yorkerhood, to glare at that person with fear and loathing and disgust, as if their mere infirm presence in our lives will forever plague us with poxes upon our houses. I do not want to subject my baby to that, so I decided that when we moved, we'd switch pediatricians to someplace closer.

What I failed to realize at the time was that I had accidentally stumbled upon a national secret so dangerous that it would send our Department of Defense into Defcon 4. Despite me, the child's parent, hand delivering a signed letter of authorization that stated, in no uncertain terms, the need for my son's medical records to be sent to this specific address (which I put in bold), the Manhattan office did not comply. I called them often, and they would give me some run-around b.s. story about the nurse in charge of photocopying (you can go to nursing school for that?) not being in the office that day, or the doctor who needed to sign off on them being with a patient or whatnot.

Clearly, my son's medical records were more important than I realized.

Clearly, the pediatrician's office was well aware that Kim Jong-Il had posted as his Facebook status, " still waiting for Meredith to send me her son's vaccine records."

Clearly, this is exactly what Al Queda has been waiting for. In their war against the American infidels, all the strategies, all the planning, all the training has been for the sole purpose of acquiring a doctor-signed photocopy of the medical sheet listing the time I had to bring in the Princeling because his belly button was still goopy and had to be re-cauterized with silver nitrate. And, of course, the fact that he had cradle cap means the terrorists have already won. We might as well surrender now. Ye gads, is there no end to my treachery!

By the time we moved, the Princeling's medical records still had not been transferred. I worried that something bad would happen to him, and we'd be stranded - yes, stranded - in Brooklyn without access to his medical history. What if, god forbid, I had to rush him to the hospital and they did not take my word for it that he was born on October 8? What if the hospital then called a social worker to come and assess my fitness as a parent because my son has a birthmark on his belly and there is no doctor authorized signature stating that he was, in fact, born with it? What if they take my son away because no one trusts me when I tell them he is up-to-date on his immunization schedule and is eating solid foods???

Nearly three months after I began this ordeal, the Princeling was happily on vacation with his grandparents in Miami, and Husband and I utilized the time to ourselves to fight with the Manhattan pediatrician's office, whose lies had reached a level so profound they were now contradicting themselves. "We're still waiting for one more signature," was followed immediately by, "We sent the records out two months ago." My husband, who happens to be a litigation attorney at a super schmancy firm famous, in fact, for their litigation department, stepped in and informed the well-meaning guardian of our nation's most precious secrets that our son's medical records legally belong to us, his parents, and therefore they had no right to hold them hostage. He told her that we would be in that afternoon to pick them up.

And so, on a day when we otherwise would have been happy to relax and enjoy ourselves, we instead made the schlep to our former neighborhood and picked up suspiciously bad photocopies of our son's medical records. Later, we went to see "Terminator: Salvation," because by that point we were both ready to see lots of stuff get blown up.

And then, of course, we sold the records to Fidel Castro.


Follow Meredith Lopez on Twitter: