With ebola going on in the news, if I get a fever, I don’t want me or a doc to have to stop and wonder if it’s ‘just the flu’. And I don’t want to be sitting in a doctor’s waiting room with sick people to get my shot. So I went to the supermarket pharmacy.
It’s, the pharmacist said, the same type as last year’s. Which isn’t the one, as I recall, that gives me laryngitis…funny to say, there is one type of flu vaccine that does. Dunno why. No, this one just makes the arm sore. Jane got tetanus in one arm and a flu shot in the other, and has two sore sides. Me, being stupid, I had the shot in the arm I regularly sleep on. Doh. Won’t do that again.
At any rate I am now flu-proof, or will be in a couple of weeks as the immune response cranks up.
Don’t believe it about ‘teachers never get the flu.’ I swear in my years in classroom, I had the flu. I had respiratory crud. I had gut crud. I lived alone at the time, and there were days I was too sick to stand up long enough to trust with a cooking chore—might leave the burner on. I’ll tell you chicken soup straight from the can with no heating is real yucky.
Then they got the flu vaccine, and I have not had the flu since, tra-la! Some unlucky souls don’t do so well with it, but since I’ve started doing that annually I haven’t even had a winter cold very often—a few sinus infections that started actually with allergy, but not the fevers and sniffles sort of common cold. Which I am also happy to do without.
Pneumonia shot wasn’t so good for me: had it last year and won’t have to have it again for, they say, five years, by which time I hope they have changed the base. I broke out in a massive plaque welt at the injection, really nasty—‘they had to fill out a report for the CDC’ kind of bad welt. So maybe it was the base for the vaccine, and they’ll improve it in five years. That was nasty.
Flu shot looks to be maybe 3 days of heat and soreness in the arm, no laryngitis—good thing.
I had a fairly nasty flu before I was ten (1965), and then not again until I took my first flu shot a few years ago. This made me somewhat wary of the shot, but I work with large numbers of the public, so I take it. Not for my good, but for theirs.
That was the “Hong Kong” flu, wasn’t it? We’d never seen that one before, so it was a big deal.
They say sometimes if you get the shot too late, you encounter the flu in the public before your immune response has cranked up as it needs to. Two week window is what I hear, between shot and actual immunity. It’s a killed virus they use, at least nowadays.
I definitely like to have the shot before I do any public gathering, be it holiday parties or flu season sf cons.
haven’t gone to get mine yet….wondering if I should go to the base or the county Health Department…depends on who’s giving them….I’d have to ask my medical insurance company (TRICARE) if they finance shots given at a pharmacy…….
I go to the Visiting Nurse Association for mine. They also give Shingles shots.
Mine did. It’s a lot more convenient, and you’re exposed to fewer sick people.
I got mine late last month–I was on a cruise around Hawaii the first week of this month. 😉 (Programmers plan ahead.) I _did_ think about my preferred sleeping side. 😉 My results are similar to yours, few “winter colds” since.
(Kauai Mariott has a koi pond in front of the lobby with some huge ones!)
checked with TRICARE, I can go to the local Kroger pharmacy and get it…..however, not tonight! You do not get a flu shot the day before you have kendo practice….especially if you’re practicing for a promotion exam……I’ll get it tomorrow after practice.
went over to the Kroger after I got my stuff out of the washing machine after kendo practice….10 minutes AFTER the pharmacy closed….
Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible to find a flu vaccine without mercury in it.
heck, my TEETH have mercury in them…..mercury in tuna, mercury in CFL bulbs (as well as regular fluorescent bulbs), mercury used to be in fever thermometers, I worry more about the stuff they put in my food more than I do the vaccine. If the levels of mercury in the vaccine are below threshold levels, I’d worry more about effects of breaking one of my CFLs.
Dunno. I still use merthiolate, at need. And Lord knows I have had bottles of that and mercurochrome poured over whole knees and elbows and swabbed down my throat, so tuna need to beware of me, I suppose.
Yes, there is a need to be aware of what new research has decided about various chemicals, and evaluate how it might impact you personally. OTOH, don’t believe everything you read (‘On the Internet’ is an addendum that should go without saying).
Not what new research doesn’t know about various chemicals? 😉
“15 Point Delusion: Ice cream is great for computers! Spoon it right in!” What I don’t know about various chemical interactions could fill tomes. I’m reasonably sure however that the biggest household hazard from a broken CFL is accidentally stepping on the glass. 😉
We used to break thermometers to get beads of mercury to play with: bigger the bead, the more impressive. Then you’d lose them, probably dissipated into your clothes or something. Never did figure out where the stuff would disappear…
So did we … and I’ve also got a mouthful of fillings with mercury in them.
Not unless they’re real new I believe.
Amalgam – it’s not coming out of those without more work than you want done, especially inside your mouth.
My father had a glass vial with a drop of mercury in it. It was fun to roll the vial around and watch the drop. After he retired, he built a mercury barometer and had it in the basement. (It didn’t actually work, unfortunately. I think he was a bit annoyed at that.) The amount of mercury was enough that he had a lot leftover, in a glass jar. (‘A lot’ being well over 50 ml, in this case.)
Yep, I’ve done that too. We also used to play with mercury in the Cape North lighthouse in front of the science museum where I worked as a teen/early 20’s. The Fresnel lenses are heavy as heck and were in a mercury “bath” as a low-friction rotation system to help the lenses turn smoothly. The lighthouse itself is made of cast iron and gets hot as hades in the summer. I can only imagine how much mercury vapour I inhaled over the years working there.
My significant other says that the mercury in fillings is not elemental mercury but is bound chemically to something else so it shouldn’t be absorbed by the body. He’s got a PhD in biological chemistry so I usually believe what he says, though it took me a while to convince him trans fats were much worse for us than other saturated fats. His training told him that there shouldn’t be that much difference. I know they took the thimerosal out of children’s vaccines because of autism fears and hadn’t realized they are still using it in the flu vaccine. But I’d rather have trace amounts of mercury from the thimerosal than bacteria in my vaccines.
When I was a kid we used merthiolate & mercurochrome on cuts and scrapes, but since I was in my 30s I’ve developed a sensitivity to mercury containing antiseptics. I had surgery and they painted me with it and it caused itchy bumps. Unpleasant.
I don’t know that he’s wrong, but I suspect so. (BS in Chemistry myself.) My understanding is metallic mercury is used to form a soft amalgam so the silver can be packed into the cavity. Then it is pressed out in the tamping and later chewing. The metalic mercury passes through the body “harmlessly”. What’s really dangerous about mercury is certain compounds it makes, e.g. methyl mercury and their bioactivity, qv.
Actually, amalgam is an alloy, so the mercury pretty much stays put. There haven’t been any definitive studies on toxicity, but since it’s been used for a long time and people don’t seem to have problems with having it in their mouths, I’d say that it’s not something to worry about.
I got my flu shot last week without any problems.
Last year, like CJ, I got the pneumonia shot and flu shot.
The site of the pneumonia shot was horrible for days!
Red, hot, painful hard knot! It really was awful. However, I had pneumonia
twice, in consecutive years in ’07 and ’08, and I’ll gladly trade
the painful injection site for having pneumonia.
They supply us with free flu shots at work, just down the hall, so it seems ungrateful not to take advantage of the offer even though I don’t work with the public much any more. I used to make sure both my elderly father and myself got flu shots regularly because neither of us, for different reasons, could afford to be sick.
And speaking of the toxins of our youth, those things we used to play with as kids that would get parents arrested for these days, we used to prefer asbestos to papier mache for things like making puppet heads or relief maps of the mountains and rivers of the province. Water, asbestos, maybe a bit of flour to bind the mixture. Even when I was in high school and it started to be known just how dangerous asbestos was, we still used it in art but the teacher mixed it up because it was thought that only the loose dry fibres were a problem. Recently when I cleared the ancestral house before it sold, I located our old craft bag of asbestos. The double bagging, labeling and custom delivery to the regional landfill was an amazingly complicated process. No hazmat suit required but just about.
I did go over to Kroger this afternoon around 3:00PM and got my flu shot. The pharmacist who gave it to me did such a good job, I hardly knew that she’d stuck me with the needle. This is completely different from what happened to me last year at the base hospital – that hurt! This one was hardly noticeable. I hope that it’s effective this season.
As for hazardous materials, I was exposed to more hazardous materials at work than any other place, including at home. Even though I played with the mercury in a broken thermometer, there were plenty of other more hazardous things around my workplaces. Having served onboard 2 very old Navy warships, there was probably more than enough exposure to asbestos, as well as potential carcinogens. But then, life in itself is dangerous, nobody gets out of it alive, anyway. The trick is to keep moving and avoid the traps.