Our pediatrician gave my daughter the wrong vaccine

Our pediatrician gave my daughter the wrong vaccine

We'd left the pediatrician's office a mere two hours before the call came. On a recent sunny, summer afternoon, I'd brought my two daughters in for their annual physicals. They'd been weighed and measured and prodded and had blood drawn and received their shots and been handed lollipops at the end. We'd discovered my 11-year-old has grown 3 inches in the past year; my 7-year-old has grown 2. Their vision and hearing and vitals are all good. Two apparently clean bills of health -- it was all a family could wish for. Their blood and urine tests, meanwhile, likely hadn't even left for the lab yet. So why then was our doctor calling us back so soon? "I'm so sorry to tell you this," she said. "The nurse gave your child the wrong vaccine." At the end of the visit, my soon-to-be middle-schooler Lucy, my beautiful Harry Potter obsessive, was supposed to get the meningitis vaccine. Instead, for reasons still not fully clear to me, the nurse saw a preteen female in the chair, reached for the HPV vaccine Gardasil, and injected her.