Mason had his first immunizations.

A few days ago Cindy drove Mason to the local health unit.

She walked into the nurse's office and chatted about breast feeding and babies. The nurses like to talk.

The nurse pulled out three long needles and jabbed them into Mason's leg.

He screamed.

The nurse advised tylenol or advil. Then they waited in the office for another 15 minutes or so and chatted, while the nurse watched Mason out of the corner of her eye to make sure he didn't have an allergic reaction.

Cindy brought Mason home where he was grumpy all day and demanded that you walk around while holding him. He screamed the instant you sat down.

The problem with medical tests.

Here's why you shouldn't put much stock into medical tests.

Example 1:

Let's say that you are an average couple and you want find out if your child-to-be will have Down syndrome. The doctor tells you that there is a test with 95% accuracy. You take the test, and it's positive for Down syndrome. Now, how worried should you be?

To begin with, the chances were approximately 1 and 500 that your child has Down syndrome. This means that out of every 1000 people born, 2 will have Down syndrome.

Now let's give these thousand people the test mentioned above, which is 95% accurate. It turns out that 50 will be tested positive for Down syndrome. But we've just seen that only 2 actually have Down syndrome. This means that they're still only a one out of 25 chance that your child has Down syndrome, which is only 4%.

In other words, if you are a typical pregnant couple, and you take a medical test for Down syndrome which is 95% accurate, and you test positive for Down syndrome, there is a 96% chance your kid does NOT have Down syndrome. Does that make sense?

Example 2:

Let's say that you already have a child with Down syndrome, and therefore the chance is 1 in 100 that your next child will have Down syndrome. You take the test mentioned above and it comes out positive.

(This means that for every 100 people tested, there will be five false positives, and one true positive. This means your chances of having a child with Down syndrome would be one out of five, or 20%.)

In other words, if you are a couple in a high-risk category, and you take a test for Down syndrome which is 95% accurate, and it comes out positive, there is an 80% chance your child will NOT have Down syndrome.

Now how valuable do these medical tests sound?

We had our "team meeting" about Jake.

On Thursday I had a "team meeting" with all of Jake's kind-hearted but pretty useless community support people. His physiotherapist, speech therapist, something else, daycare worker and daycare manager showed up (the daycare people aren't useless).

The idea is that we "set goals" for Jake's progress so that we can "all be on the same page".

Every few months we get a phone call from one of the "team members" to have a "goal meeting". Usually it doesn't happen because they only work 10 hours a week and we can never settle on a date or time. But I guess their year-end evaluations are due and they need to fill out some paperwork on Jake so they all agreed on a time and place.

I told the daycare people that they didn't have to come because it was pretty useless. I didn't go to the last one, but Cindy told me they all basically sat around asking her the same questions over and over again and telling her that Jake "eats normally". A pretty bizarre thing to say considering he has a g-tube because he doesn't eat or drink on his own, and is underweight.

The daycare people said they wanted to go and asked me if the behaviourist was coming. I said, "Hell no". We pay her $150 an hour to teach us how to make Jake eat, not to sit around and talk about goals, ask dumb questions and make inane statements.

So we all went. I brought Jake along so I could use him as an excuse to duck out early when I started getting annoyed. (I gotta be polite because they control some of our funding.)

I showed up, sat there politely for an hour, then left. It was what I expected - pretty pointless. Talk means nothing. I can sit around and talk for hours about everything I want Jake to do, but that doesn't get anything done.