When It Comes to My Kid, Ophidiophobia Is the Least of My Worries

Since becoming a dad, my greatest fears have turned into mere nuisances… And whole new fears have become real.

Image via DALL-E artificial intelligence from OpenAI, based on a prompt by the author… Hence the really weird-looking snake.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a phobia of snakes. I don’t mean the typical fear we humans have of things that slither, a probable remnant of the time when we were up in trees and something would come get us. I mean an irrational fear that would make me run in the other direction at the sight of anything resembling a snake. I mean an irrational fear that would make me lose sleep over the thought of a snake coming into my room.

I mean a full-on phobia.

A Bigger Fear

Once my daughter was born, all sorts of other irrational fears set in. I’d get up in the night and check to make sure she was breathing. To that end, I went as far as getting a pulse oximeter sock she would wear. It would warn me if her oxygen was low or her heart rate slowed down. (That sock actually gave me plenty of clues that she had contracted RSV, but that’s for another story.)

As an epidemiologist and public health practitioner, I know that vaccines do not cause autism. I know vaccines save lives, and that she needed to be vaccinated to guarantee a healthier life…