Note: This piece appeared on Facebook yesterday.
Gettin them shots!
When we were a child in the Vienna, Illinois grade school, one of the biggest fears that we had was “shot day” when the local health department would come to our school and line every one up and inoculate them. There were a variety of shots back then but the one that usually bothered us the most was the DTW vaccine that always made our arm so sore. We can remember coming back in tears to our classroom after getting one of those but we never gave any consideration as to what they were really protecting us from. We just hated shots.
We remember the summer between our third and fourth grades when we came down with the old red measles that were going around. We were just a kid and we hated to give up a couple of weeks of our summer to stay in the dark because we had been warned that if we watched television we could ruin our eyes. We did that anyway and, sure enough, our eyesight went bad during our fourth grade year and we were stuck in glasses or contacts until we under went cataract surgery in our early sixties and got twenty twenty vision once again. We had a mild case of the mumps but were always worried that they might “fall” and render us impotent for the rest of our lives. We also had a horrible case of the chicken pox during our youth and we retain some scars from that to this very day if you look closely on our face. We found out later that if one has had chicken pox that there is a far greater chance of developing shingles than if one had been vaccinated for it.
We have seen so many people suffer from shingles in their older years but it is not confined to that age group as we saw a young man that we know suffering from them just over a week ago. We asked him if he had been vaccinated against them in his youth and he simply looked away from us in shame and went on his way. He had missed a whole weeks work with them and was limping noticeably which is what brought the whole thing to our attention in the first place. We told him that he could get a shot that helped to prevent shingles from occurring but he told us that he came from a family that did not believe in inoculating for such things.
We have seen people who have died the pain from shingles was such that they simply could not bear it anymore. We were at our doctor for a physical exam and she went through our list of vaccinations and gave us an inoculation for pneumonia since we are now sixty five years old and that is the prescribed routine. The shot made our arm sore for a couple of days but we did not mind as we remembered how we almost died of double pneumonia just under a decade ago when God stepped in and spared our life with a welcome miracle while we lay dying in a hospital intensive care ward. Our doctor also reminded us once again to go and get the shingles preventative and we will do that around the first of March of this year.
We will not comment on those who fail to get inoculated except to say that we feel that God provided the knowledge to allow those who have developed these life affirming vaccines to be able to do so in order to benefit all of mankind. We remember when we went to get the first vaccine for polio that came out and how grateful my parents were that we could benefit from it. My brother had almost died from polio as a child and they, as members of the greatest generation who developed these preventatives, were so grateful that their younger son would not have to go through the agonies that his brother had to live through.
We all have a responsibility to ourselves and to those who come after us. Those who developed so many of these vaccines did so because they had seen so much suffering and had resolved to alleviate as much of it as they could. It is tough to see a child suffer and the helpless feeling that it brings on but we so often do not see the later ramifications that may come to those who have to go through it when it did not have to be so. We have been through so much the last few years that we simply look back on the days when we dreaded taking shots with a smile on our face and an unending joy in our heart at the agonies that we did miss out on because of those who cared enough to try to do something about them.
Regards,
Joe
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