Saturday, October 31, 2009

Is it just me...?

['Enola Gay' returning to Tinian. Her sister ship was the B-29 'Necessary Evil']
I got a flu shot a week ago.

Thursday evening during world series game 2 I got a bad sore throat which came on quickly. Friday it worsened and became a head cold. Saturday I was having difficulty breathing even with my mouth open. I dragged my broken body to a drugstore for patent medicines. One of which had no effect at all. (house brands not always a bargain?) and the other, an inhaler, worked but stung like a sonofabitch for half an hour. Between Friday afternoon and this Sunday morning I slept perhaps 30 hours.

The checker at the market where I got the inhaler said that she also got sick shortly after she got a flu shot.

Between me and the checker is just two incidents and may be coincidence. Has anyone else gotten sick after getting a flu shot? This was a regular flu shot, not swine flu.


Postnote Sunday AM -
A friend who works in a public health clinic agrees with Harvey that there is little likelihood the vector was the flu shot. Indeed it is most likely that I have the H1N1 virus, the swine flu.

Which is most disturbing. I thought there was a tacit understanding that it would only affect other people. It was supposed to be something that never really happens other than on television, like killer bees. And how unseemly is it for a Jew to have swine flu? They couldn't name it for some kosher animal? [schmucks]

Having H-anything N-anything is unnerving after seeing the 1918 graves in Sunset View Cemetery. Even in the dinky remote El Cerrito of 1918 large numbers of people died. Considering what happened in the less populous, less connected world of 1918, the effect of a similar outbreak now daunts the imagination.

It is no exaggeration to say that a recurrence of a disease like the Spanish Influenza of 1918 is a vastly greater danger to the human race than all our nuclear weapons combined. Nuclear weapons kill people where they are dropped. The Spanish Influenza killed a varying fraction of the population everywhere in the world.

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3 comments:

  1. I got mine several weeks ago and have never felt better. The flu shot does not prevent you from getting a bad cold.

    ReplyDelete
  2. The fever broke last night about ten. I am now exploring the difference between feeling better and feeling good.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous8:43 AM

    Where the hell are you???????????
    Your Sisters want to know!!!

    ReplyDelete