Vaccinations, A personal account
Feb. 6th, 2015 12:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fabrisseI am a daughter of the military. I'm also the daughter of the most well organized woman in the history of the world. I got my shots. I got them on time. I got them for the region in which we were living or going to live.
What does this mean? It means that I was vaccinated for typhus (live vaccine) and bubonic plague (dead vaccine) when I was three before we moved to Vietnam -- and so was my 6 month old sister. I was vaccinated for polio, smallpox, and Diphtheria Pertussis Tetanus (DPT) before I was six. There was no chickenpox vaccine, so I got chickenpox when I was seven as did my little sister. I had the flu shot most years.
I got the rubella vaccination in third grade because that's when it became widely available, and my school was scheduled for mumps vaccination (again, a relatively new vaccine) when one of my classmates contracted it. Fortunately for the rest of us, hers ended up the only case. She ended up repeating 3rd grade because she'd been out for over 6 weeks and wasn't able to catch up by the end of the school year. I mention this because some of the anti-vaccination crowd say there aren't long term consequences of childhood diseases. Even ignoring the sometimes severe physical consequences of childhood diseases, there can be social and psychological consequences from the quarantines.
Thanks to Mom, I had every vaccination required at the appropriate time, including updates before we moved to Belgium in my late teens.
One of my funnier stories is when I cut myself badly while I was living in London in the early 1980s. I didn't have my shot records with me and didn't know whether I needed a tetanus booster. They were able to find me in the WHO database because US military shot records had been entered. Yes, I needed the booster.
As an adult, I've had required shots before visiting Egypt, including one of the Hepatitis (C?) vaccines. Because I had pneumonia as a child and then three times as an adult, I've had the pneumonia vaccine. I have a yearly flu shot. I updated my DPT 18 months ago so that I didn't risk being a pertussis carrier as many of our customers bring their young children to meetings; plus, it was time for a tetanus booster.
Tomorrow morning, I'm going to my doctor's office before breakfast to have a blood draw. They're checking to see if I have the immunity to measles because I'm in a high risk group.
This is as much anecdata as anything Jenny McCarthy has written. I know that. But I also want people to know that most of us made it to adulthood with a full schedule of vaccinations.
What does this mean? It means that I was vaccinated for typhus (live vaccine) and bubonic plague (dead vaccine) when I was three before we moved to Vietnam -- and so was my 6 month old sister. I was vaccinated for polio, smallpox, and Diphtheria Pertussis Tetanus (DPT) before I was six. There was no chickenpox vaccine, so I got chickenpox when I was seven as did my little sister. I had the flu shot most years.
I got the rubella vaccination in third grade because that's when it became widely available, and my school was scheduled for mumps vaccination (again, a relatively new vaccine) when one of my classmates contracted it. Fortunately for the rest of us, hers ended up the only case. She ended up repeating 3rd grade because she'd been out for over 6 weeks and wasn't able to catch up by the end of the school year. I mention this because some of the anti-vaccination crowd say there aren't long term consequences of childhood diseases. Even ignoring the sometimes severe physical consequences of childhood diseases, there can be social and psychological consequences from the quarantines.
Thanks to Mom, I had every vaccination required at the appropriate time, including updates before we moved to Belgium in my late teens.
One of my funnier stories is when I cut myself badly while I was living in London in the early 1980s. I didn't have my shot records with me and didn't know whether I needed a tetanus booster. They were able to find me in the WHO database because US military shot records had been entered. Yes, I needed the booster.
As an adult, I've had required shots before visiting Egypt, including one of the Hepatitis (C?) vaccines. Because I had pneumonia as a child and then three times as an adult, I've had the pneumonia vaccine. I have a yearly flu shot. I updated my DPT 18 months ago so that I didn't risk being a pertussis carrier as many of our customers bring their young children to meetings; plus, it was time for a tetanus booster.
Tomorrow morning, I'm going to my doctor's office before breakfast to have a blood draw. They're checking to see if I have the immunity to measles because I'm in a high risk group.
This is as much anecdata as anything Jenny McCarthy has written. I know that. But I also want people to know that most of us made it to adulthood with a full schedule of vaccinations.
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Hepatitis vaccine
Date: 2015-02-06 05:45 pm (UTC)I'm old enough to have had many of the childhood diseases before there was a vaccine, but I remember day when people of every age (ie parents as well as the students and younger siblings) stood in long lines in my elementary school cafeteria to get the sugar cube with the polio vaccine on it. Probably all of the adults knew or knew of someone who had had the disease, and if there were people avoiding the vaccine, I didn't hear of it.
Re: Hepatitis vaccine
Date: 2015-02-09 09:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-02-06 06:32 pm (UTC)I actually didn't get a tetanus shot until I was in college. We missed it, somehow, and my college wouldn't accept me until I got it. It was really weird because it felt like I actually had tetanus. :P
no subject
Date: 2015-02-09 09:37 pm (UTC)It can be easy to miss a shot, especially if it's not one of the grouped together shots.