Huh. I assumed if you had to inject yourself regularly, you’d get used to it and it would be nbd. And I didn’t know insulin needles are small compared to vaccines, why is that?
You could have claimed an egg allergy. Better to get over the fear, though. I wish they didn’t bother me, but at least I can get through it now.
Make you a custom brace that you have to wear 23 hours a day for years in order to correct it. Looks very uncomfortable.
Insulin needles can be very fine gauge (thin), as well as very short, since the insulin needs only be delivered into the subcutaneous layer of fat right under the skin, which is more comfortable than injecting into muscle tissue for several physiological reasons.
Many vaccines must be delivered deeper, into muscle tissue, again for clinical reasons. The viscosity of some vaccines require a thicker gauge needle than does insulin’s viscosity. There are also other considerations for injections, for instance:
… The method of administration of injectable vaccines is determined, in part, by the inclusion of adjuvants in some vaccines. An adjuvant is a vaccine component distinct from the antigen that enhances the immune response to the antigen but might also increase risk of adverse reactions. To decrease risk of local adverse events, non-live vaccines containing an adjuvant should be injected into a muscle. Administering a vaccine containing an adjuvant either subcutaneously or intradermally can cause local irritation, induration, skin discoloration, inflammation, and granuloma formation.… [cdc.gov)
Giving injections is lots more complicated than it seems-that’s why nurses and pharmacists go to school all those years.
…
Interesting, thanks.
I remember lining up outside and waiting a long time for the swine flu shot (which I remember was surprising unpainful). One year I was diagnosed with pneumonia during a school physical (two weeks off from school!).
My elementary school didn’t have a cafeteria. Students walked home for lunch and back again (when I was in 5th grade, the school started serving lunch, but a lot of students still went home for lunch).
Can’t tell you what they do nowadays in schools, but here’s my memories of elementary school in the 1980s and early 1990s.
I went to school in Toronto. I attended multiple elementary schools, all of them in what was then the City of North York, so fell under the North York Board of Education. These schools would have a “health room” where you could for example go and lie down if you were feeling sick. I recall there being a “school nurse” at some of these schools, but I don’t know if it was a registered nurse or just some lady who would spend some time in the health room in case someone wasn’t feeling well.
In the school where I attended Grade 1, I was once sent to the health room and they gave me a hearing test which I think I passed fine.
In the school where I attended Grades 2-4, we would sometimes be bussed to another school for things like dental checkups. I remember going there in maybe Grade 2, and the dental hygienist teasing me by describing some kind of scary device or invasive treatment or something they were going to perform on me (they didn’t, they just did a standard dental checkup).
In Grade 4, a “nit nurse” came and set up a workstation just outside my classroom, and checked our heads for lice with chopsticks, as described by the OP. I had had lice in Grade 2 and was afraid she would find something. But she didn’t.
The school I attended for Grade 5 was built I think shortly after World War I. There was a dentist’s chair in the health room and I may have been given a dental checkup by someone there. One think that chair had attached to it was some kind of old-fashioned dentist’s drill with a big bit and that was operated by a hand crank! I wonder if that ever got used on any kid, say in the 40s or 50s!
All the schools I attended from Kindergarten through Grade 5 used the gym for school events. Interestingly, one of these schools had two gyms. But no auditorium as such. However, my middle school (Grades 6 to 8) had a “gymnatorium”, so there was a proper stage in the gym. When there was a concert or play or what have you, folding metal chairs would be arranged on the gym floor. Another middle school in North York that I once visited with the school choir did as I recall have a “cafetorium”, so cafeteria that doubles as an auditorium, as did a high school near where I lived and where my class in Grade 8 once went to see their production of “West Side Story”.
My high school, which was in the then-Toronto Board of Education, did have a dedicated auditorium, which included an upper gallery, and two gyms, one for each gender.
All the gyms at my schools also had stages used occasionally for plays and speeches. Although I went to a secular public school, I also remember school singalongs with everyone sitting on the gym floor - including hymns like Onward Christian Soldiers, popular war songs and Christmas carols. I doubt the former is still a thing. I can still remember all the words to the songs they made us sing.
Nice to see you posting, themapleleaf. Am sure you probably have been, but less sure our paths have crossed here recently.
Thanks, Dr_Paprika. I’m a busy guy and a lot of things divide my attention, but this thread is right up my alley.
Hadn’t thought about this in years, but the elementary school vision tests in school were how my pathological myopia was found. I could see up close just fine, and I usually had my nose in a book. Obviously I wasn’t driving or anything like that, and I wasn’t sports oriented.
So my eyes had deteriorated a fair bit by third grade, I guess, but there were no obvious clues until the vision screening. Then the school called my mother, who took me to the ophthalmologist, who said “prepare yourself, she’ll be blind by age 40.” But meanwhile, I was able to get eyeglasses. What a miracle that was! I remember gasping in amazement as we drove home after my first prescription was fitted. I kept saying things like, “oh my goodness! You can see individual leaves on trees without being right next to them!”
(As to the future blindness: fortunately, due to advances in medical technology and a bit of luck, that prediction proved completely wrong! These days I see much better than my peers, because I had intraocular lenses implanted in my 50s, whereas most people don’t do it until they’re in their 70s.)
Vision tests, check.
Vaccines, check.
No lice or scoliosis.
I got my mmr with a Jet Injector!
I’ll bet that’s how I got my swine flu shot
I worked the swine flu public health vaccination clinic for months and months. We used only individual syringes and needles for injections.
Jet injector guns were pulled from use long before that.
… It is called a “jet injector” and enjoyed a brief career in the 1960’s through 1990’s, especially in the military and Veteran’s Administration. It did not create a fine mist, but rather a high pressure stream that would penetrate the skin. In 1997 the DoD and VA stopped using the jet injector because of its numerous problems:
While several manufacturers claim to have resolved the issues, jet injection was eclipsed by ultra-sharp disposable needles which are safer and less painful…
[from Quora]
It’s possible I’m misremembering something that happened nearly 50 years ago. I thought the swine flu shot I got was surprisingly painless but it could have been a different shot I got another time
Title: Influenza Vaccination, 1976
Description: A line of people each awaiting a vaccination at a shopping center during the National Influenza (A/New Jersey/76) Immunization Program. Also known as the Swine Flu, these immunizations were being administered by way of a jet-injector, which you can see in action at right.
Influenza Vaccination, 1976 · CDC Museum Digital Exhibits
Thank you. I don’t see myself in the picture but the clothing and hair styles take me bsck
Long before when? I got my shot in 1976
It’s weird, I have a clear memory of my mom driving around the local junior high, where the vaccinations were being given, looking for a parking place but no clear memory of actually getting the vaccine.
The Quora cite says the injector guns were withdrawn from use by the DoD and the VA in 1997.
The ‘long before’ withdrawal from use for swine flu vaccinations was for the swine flu pandemic public health vaccination clinics I worked as a nurse 2009-2010, where only individual syringes and needle were used. I graduated from nursing school (Mass General Hospital) in 1981, we were never trained in the use of injector guns so I think they were already rarely used in civilian populations.
I know I got at least one injector gun vaccination in Iowa in the late ‘50s or early ‘60s-no idea what vaccine it would have been but I sure remember the experience, I would have been less than 12 or 13 years old.
Ah. I forgot about that swine flu vaccine program. I still think of the 1976 program as the swine flu vaccine program because I’m old(ish) and because the 1976 program was enormously controversial
We had scoliosis screening in grade school (sometime around 5th grade, IIRC). They did the boys separate from the girls, and did it in the “Green Room” (the multi-purpose room in the school basement which was also used for music lessons, an election polling station, etc.). We had to take our shirts off for it, but it was behind a screen, so none of the other students saw anyone without a shirt.
We lucked out, and never had a lice outbreak while I was in school.
While I remember getting a vaccine (probably either MMR or polio) at a school, it wasn’t the school that I attended; it was a public vaccination event that happened to be held at a school.