Every Fall, my wife hectors and harrasses me to get a flu shot. Which I'm never inclined to do. I usually wind up getting it, though. This year, I had a doctor's appointment yesterday, decided to get the shot while I was already there. Because of my age, they gave me the "high dose" version. Which according to the paper they gave me afterward said it contains four times the amount of a certain ingredient than regular flu shots.
In addition to the usual sore arm, early this morning (around 2:00 AM) I was pretty sick. My body ached all over, even my gonads hurt. I climbed into bed and lay there shivering feverishly. I got up typically late this morning and I felt better. I'm pretty much back to normal now. But this was not a pleasant experience.
Okay, half a dozen years ago when I got a flu shot, I was sitting down. The person who gave me the shot was standing and stuck me at an angle. That was a bad scene. My arm hurt all the way down for months. Apparently, when I was given the shot, the needle went into the bursa instead of the muscle. All the juice from the shot went into the bursa and just stayed there, festering away. It mostly cleared up over the course of about a year. When I talked to my doctor about this at the time, they said my arm pain couldn't be the result of the vaccination. I knew that wasn't true in my case.
So we get these vaccinations to reduce the probability of getting an illness. But nothing is perfect. Occasionally there are serious reactions to vaccinations. Like one or two per million for the common ones. Nobody wants to be that one person in a million. Did you know the government passed regulation to compel pharmaceutical companies that make the vaccines to contribute to a fund for people who suffer illness from a vaccine? It's called the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. The very existence of such a thing tells me a person is at some risk in getting vaccinated, however small.
Lately there has been a bunch of stuff in the news about parents who refuse to get their school age children vaccinated. Some of us may wonder why parents would do this. But I can say that there have been cases of infants and children being severely injured from childhood vaccinations. Like brain damage. However low the risk, some parents don't want to take it.
In addition to the usual sore arm, early this morning (around 2:00 AM) I was pretty sick. My body ached all over, even my gonads hurt. I climbed into bed and lay there shivering feverishly. I got up typically late this morning and I felt better. I'm pretty much back to normal now. But this was not a pleasant experience.
Okay, half a dozen years ago when I got a flu shot, I was sitting down. The person who gave me the shot was standing and stuck me at an angle. That was a bad scene. My arm hurt all the way down for months. Apparently, when I was given the shot, the needle went into the bursa instead of the muscle. All the juice from the shot went into the bursa and just stayed there, festering away. It mostly cleared up over the course of about a year. When I talked to my doctor about this at the time, they said my arm pain couldn't be the result of the vaccination. I knew that wasn't true in my case.
So we get these vaccinations to reduce the probability of getting an illness. But nothing is perfect. Occasionally there are serious reactions to vaccinations. Like one or two per million for the common ones. Nobody wants to be that one person in a million. Did you know the government passed regulation to compel pharmaceutical companies that make the vaccines to contribute to a fund for people who suffer illness from a vaccine? It's called the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. The very existence of such a thing tells me a person is at some risk in getting vaccinated, however small.
Lately there has been a bunch of stuff in the news about parents who refuse to get their school age children vaccinated. Some of us may wonder why parents would do this. But I can say that there have been cases of infants and children being severely injured from childhood vaccinations. Like brain damage. However low the risk, some parents don't want to take it.