Interesting that my baby book shows that I’ve been vaccinated against smallpox and my mother was an RN so I believe this to be accurate. If there’s a scar from it, I can’t find it.
Re: smallpox vax scars
It depends on who did the inoculation. I remember nurses scrubbing the vaccination site with the boue liquid (the vaccine) and then jabbing an area the size of a nickel, if not larger. The pox from that energetic vaccination was a fearsome, bubbly-looking scab.
And then I remember my dad telling me of a smallpox vax he got shortly before he retired from the Air Force. It was a doctor who administered it.
He sterilized a place on Daddy’s forearm, then used a rough piece of gauze to scrub the skin until it turned red. He took the needle, and made four or five scratches on the skin, and painted on the vaccine.
Of course, Daddy asked the doctor about it!
The doctor said rubbing the skin brought the blood to the surface, so the light scratches were suffucient to allow the vaccine to penetrate. He told Daddy he’d still develop a small scab, and this procedure would leave almost no scar.
It did and it did.
~VOW
My scar was a lot more prominent 30 years ago than it is now.
I also used to have a lot of scars from chickenpox, but they seem to have all faded. I can’t find any of those, now.
I got the first vaccine shot a couple of weeks ago. It has proved rather difficult to find out whether I had the first shot as a kid: no one kept my childhood vaccine records, I’m just on the cusp of when they stopped, and my mom had two shots but never scarred. But I assume no. Anyway, the injection site was actively sore for a week. Ow.
I don’t know anyone with monkeypox, and my risk is low, but better safe than sorry. I’ll get the second shot in a couple of weeks.