My daughter had a seizure the day of her well-baby visit.

A series of MRIs showed progressive demyelination - the result of some inflammatory or autoimmune process I was told.

“We don’t know if she’ll develop normally. We don’t know what caused this to happen, and we know you asked about her vaccinations that morning, but we know it wasn’t related those. Vaccines don’t cause this.”

I was a young mom with no medical training and I believed them. It took me years - and a medical degree, and years of hearing that same story come out of other mothers’ mouths while I stood on the other side of the exam table - to understand what had actually happened in that conversation.

The actual truth was, they didn’t know. They just weren’t willing to say so.