We just went to get ours - me because I’m an English teacher specialising in kids, so I get spitty snotty hands on me all day long, and my kids because Big One has asthma and Little One is still at the spitty snotty stage.
Last year I thought that we were all pretty healthy, and couldn’t really afford the 100 dollars or so that it would cost to get the three of us done.
My husband caught A type at work and shared it with me and Big One. We were sooo sick. Tamiflu worked for kid but not for me. I lost a buttload of money because I had to close all my classes while we were ill.
Then four weeks later I got B type. (Something that apparently happened a lot to people in this area last year…)
This year, we paid up and were first in the queue.
Yes, I forgot that bit too - a lot of the mothers of the smaller kids in my school are pregnant or bring babies under one to class, so the fewer chances there are of passing bugs onto them, the better.
Not the same as AIDs patients, but a similar feeling of responsiblity not to pass on something that could have devastating consequences.
I don’t think tamiflu is a vaccine - it’s a drug you take either after exposure to flu or soon after symptoms develop to reduce the severity of your symptoms.
The vaccine in Japan this year has a bunch of different flu viruses in it - the dr reeled them off to me but I forget!
Got mine last week. My cow-orker refuses to get one because,“Every time I get a flu shot I get the flu for a couple of days!” I tried to tell him that if he had gotten the flu it would have been for more than just a couple of days, and he came back with the ultimate knowledge stopper-“Well, all I know is…”
Once they start a sentence with that phrase, you might as well just walk away.
I did get a bad fluey reaction from a jab one year, but I had the injection on top of a heavy cold, and I think that made it happen. Still, anything is better than the real thing.
After that incident though I am careful not to schedule a jab for the day before anything that can’t be cancelled, but it has never happened again since.
That ‘fluey reaction’ is what we technically call ‘viral syndrome’ you can get a couple of days of symptoms following a flu vaccine, but like you say, it’s nothing compared to the real deal. The term ‘flu’ is tossed around a lot and has basically come to mean any viral infection these days. Like ‘I got a little stomach flu’.
I got my vaccination because I work in the ER and I’ll invariably be exposed and either become too ill to work or I’ll pass it on to my sick and immunocompromised patients.
I got mine, because (strictly anecdotal), the one year I didn’t get a flu shot, I got the flu. And anyone who’s ever really had the flu (not a cold, not a tummy virus) will remember how truly hellish that is.
Plus, I have no sick/vacation days at my new job, and I visit my mother in assisted-living a couple weekends a month, so I cannot afford to be sick.
I got mine a few weeks back when I was at my doctor’s for a routine checkup. I don’t know where the hype I keep hearing on the radio about a shortage comes from. My mother-in-law was at the doctor’s office at the same time (we had sequential appointments), and she refused the shot, claiming that in a previous year she had gotten the disease from the vaccination. As a previous poster said, once a person is convinced this is the case, no amount of fact will convince them otherwise. Of course my MIL, being 90 years old, needs the flu (and pneumonia) vaccine a lot more than I do.
I got one last year and the years before through my school. Now that I’ve graduated… eh. Those things are pretty expensive. I think I’ll chance it. I don’t do anything that would make it an especially good idea and I doubt the hours I might potentially lose in productivity would compare to what I have to put down to get the shot in the first place.
I got the shot for the first time this year. I’ve never had the flu - heck, the worst cold I’ve ever had lasted about 4 days - but since it’s free here in Ontario and the nurse at work was giving it, I figured I could afford to go down the hall and get jabbed. The whole thing took about 3 minutes, and I went right back to work with instructions to go back to the clinic if I felt funny. My husband has had the flu before, and he got the shot this year too, as a preventative measure.
Neither of us work in a “risky” area (no small children or AIDS patients!). He’s a grad student and I’m a chemist in a pharmaceutical lab.
We just got it again at work last week. The company pays for it. No one works with vulnerable people, the company just isn’t interested in losing work-time to the 'flu. It’s not mandatory to have the shot.
I haven’t had the 'flu for a couple of years now. I clearly, distinctly remember the last bout of it that I had. I remember the part where I tried to walk to the bathroom from bed, and ended up just lying on the floor, shaking, too weak to go on. Feeling a bit wonky from the shot for a day or two is nothing like having the 'flu itself.
Not me. A friend works for a biotech firm and was strongly advised a couple years ago that healthy 20 to 30-somethings who don’t work with high risk people (with kids/elderly/sick people) are better off not getting it. I forget exactly what the reasoning is, but it has something to do with possible bad reactions out-weighing the small risk of becoming really ill getting it out “in the wild”. I haven’t gotten the flu (vs a bad cold) more than 3 or 4 times my entire life, so I’m not really worried about getting it now, either.
And wasn’t there a doper a year or two ago who got the vaccine, promptly got the flu, passed out on the stairs and broke their leg? That’d be me.
