Flu Shots

Around this time of year, when the nights are cooling and the leaves are turning,  I think about getting a flu shot.  It's so terrifically easy to get a flu shot now than it was, maybe even, just five years ago.  All you have to do is walk into a big box store that sells everything from underwear to motor oil and has a pharmacy.  The pharmacy technician or pharmacist will give you a shot right then and there for around 25 dollars.  Me, though, I always think I don't need one.  I'm strong and healthy and rarely even get a cold, but, for the last few years, I keep thinking more and more of getting one.  Why not, right?  It's preventive medicine, and I do believe in that even if I don't believe I'll get the flu.

Today, though, I've pretty much made up my mind I'm getting a flu shot.  I'm watching Albert Nobbs, and I've got about 40 minutes left, and everyone is coming down with typhoid fever.  I'm thinking shit, I don't want to go like that.  Then I go cuckoo for about two or three minutes and see germs on me and think about a cackling Typhoid Mary in a kissing booth and I'm in line.  Next thing I know  I'm washing my hands.  I even scrub under my nails real good with too hot water like I'm going to deliver a baby or something.

Then I go Google search Typhoid Mary.  Idiot?  Yes, I am.  It's like when you know you shouldn't go to WebMD about that weird mole, but you just can't stop yourself, and you do and then you know you've got skin cancer. 

Returning back to Typhoid Mary, she was an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever.  From her outward appearance, no one knew she was infected.  She was like all those normal looking flu people who touched the grocery cart you're going to push today or tomorrow.  By the time she was tested for the disease by a physician, she had infected something like 50 people and killed some (nobody knows the exact number). Turns out she was cooking for folks and transmitting the disease through food preparation.  She was patient zero or whatever they call it, but a patient zero who didn't manifest the symptoms. 

After being identified, New York state isolates and quarantines her in a state hospital for three years (1907-1910), she's released when the New York State Commissioner of Health decides that disease carriers should no longer be kept in isolation, let's get real, imprisonment, because that's basically what happened to her.  Upon release, Mary was given employment as a laundress, and, at this point, you're feeling pretty bad for Mary, right?!  She gets this disease, through no fault of her own, and she's just an Irish immigrant trying to make good who lost three years of her life in a state hospital on an island for a disease that the state deemed criminal.  She loved cooking and now she's washing laundy.  Well, get this, the bitch left her laundress job and changed her name, so she could go back to cooking during which she infected some people and killed some too.

I'm getting a flu shot.  No shit, the flu isn't the typhoid fever, but I don't want it just the same, and now I have this irrational fear of communicable diseases.  Hand me the Purell.