Cafe Einstein - LPTPW 17 - animal, vegetable, and/or a minerally type chemically thing, and maybe some other things as well, yes :)

Oh I get flu shots all right. But the flu keeps mutating* and this year it has done quite a bit of that. Alas when people are ill they go and see their local doctor, typically when both are breathing. Viruses take unfair advantage of this human habit. This I think is the basic error I make in my job ( seeing sick people ). I usually dodge most bullets. This is why I like the movies The Omega Man and I am Legend, my blood has got to be worth bottling ! So I crawl into bed, or more accurately I fail to crawl out of it. At this point I graduate to The Man Flu. This is a key signal to my dear wife to go out & about for the day, shopping and visiting friends etc. She says she will be back at around 5pm, give or take, and if I'm still alive she may cook me a meal. I credit this as a Perfectly Rational Response. :-)

[ I ought make time to train my large dog to go to the fridge and bring back food and drink. He is a Golden Retriever after all. Perhaps some sort of pannier arrangement draped over the forequarters. My smaller dog - cross b/w a terrier and a sausage - already serves as hot water bottle. ]

Cheers, Mike.

[long technical aside]
* The virus multiplies via each cell that is infected. It hijacks the DNA photocopier that exists within for our purposes. Replication is not perfect. About one error per one billion DNA base pairs is typical. RNA replication is more imperfect. Anyway like a piece of paper that you feed the copy of back to the photocopier input, errors will creep in and be perpetuated. This is why our vaccines, being based upon the estimates of the top three variant near-future threats, can run out of relevance during production runs which are typically several months from specification to usable vaccine. That happened earlier this year and so much so that they completely restarted production ! About six weeks was lost on the usual southern hemisphere vaccination schedule. When winter did come the epidemic had an extra six weeks free of antiviral action from the vaccines.

Now while I still got the benefit of that second run, this year also had another factor : all major flu types were up in their activity in the community simultaneously. Usually they don't peak at around the same times.

There is nothing terrible about this. Don't blame the weather/climate, the CIA, The Illuminati, pigs, ducks, the Chinese or the Democrats. It just happens from time to time and gives us these types of flu seasons. This was happening in the olden days too, and for reasons rather more bland than the usual Area 51 narratives. However there are more DNA photocopiers on the planet, and rapid air travel to distribute the results. Get on a plane in Heathrow and you can be pretty much anywhere in 36 hours which is well under the relevant incubation period. Influenza is the ultimate frequent flyer. Now in Captain Cook's day it could get on a ship in Portsmouth and take two years to reach Sydney. On ship the virus would one way or another easily run out of susceptibles by then.
[/long technical aside]

I hear you Chris. Got a flu shot once and promptly got sick. It was a freeby.
Now I take my chances.
Do I win?

The US has about 300 million people in it, of those about 30 THOUSAND die every year from the flu or its complications. If ALL of those people got a flu shot somewhere near 85% of those people would NOT die. The flu shot is not perfect but what it is supposed to do is give you some immunity from the FULL BLOWN flu so we only get the minor side affect stuff. After all it's not usually one thing that kills us, it's the accumulation of stuff that finally does us in. Even in a heart attack there was some underlying cause of it, ie eating poorly that caused the blood supply to slow down or even stop etc, etc. The flu is the same way, it reduces the bodies ability to fight off all the other things that go along with it.

There ARE some people who should NEVER get a fly shot though, people with egg allergies are just one of those groups. As are those who have had severe reactions to previous flu shots, those people need to have a conversation about what is different NOW then when they got sick THEN with their Doctor, and decide what is best for them.

All that being said NO ONE is getting out of this Life alive, we ALL have to die of something, that's just the way it is.

That happened here last winter too, and they're worried it might again this year.

I got a flu shot at work once and very promptly got the flu. Refused the shot for years after that. Got sick some years, some not. Finally let my doctor talk me into it a few years ago (mainly out of fear of getting the flu and giving it to my ailing mother; it would have finished her off even sooner) and haven't been sick since. Last year, they offered a shot along with the wellness screening* at work and I got it. This year, they said the shot wasn't ready yet (due to concern over getting it right this time), but just go to a screening at another building and they'll have it there. I think I'll wait until I see the doc next month.

Meanwhile, I am deeply regretting seeing a podiatrist. My right foot was a tad sore and tight on the bottom. Now it's tight in the Achilles as well as the bottom, and ranges from uncomfortable to extreme pain no matter whether I'm wearing my old, medium-aged steel toed, or new shoes, any of them with or without the custom orthotics, or nothing at all, and walking, standing, or sitting. Actually, some sitting positions are the most painful.

All right now, let's get a bit more work done before lunch. Or, perhaps, go to the euphemism. Yes, that sounds like a better idea.

* A fairly useless exercise that wastes a half hour of your time and produces results of dubious accuracy, and produces stress by asking asinine questions about stress and lifestyle. First of all, the samples drawn are kept at room temperature for several hours and probably not tested until the next day. This year, they came up with an A1C for me that was .4 higher than the last time the doc did it, and I predict next month it will be back down where it was before. However, if you don't get the screening done, you have to pay something on the order of $300/year more for insurance.