Taking my medicine

The flu is cutting a swathe through my workplace, so I got the seasonal vaccination last Friday.

(I’d tried getting it at work, but apparently the company ran out of the vaccine and suspended the free shot program. Turns out that my doctor’s office was also out, as well as local drugstores whose web sites advertised they had it. I finally found it at a Safeway, where I was the only person under the age of senility getting it.)

However, for the first time since I started getting the vaccination every flu season for the past 15 years (except one year in the UK when I couldn't get it, whereupon I was flattened for four weeks, not a word of lie), it seems I’ve reacted to the vaccine, and I’ve started showing symptoms of sore throat and incipient joint aches.

It might be defective serum (wouldn’t be surprised that this shouldn't be any different from everything else in this state), or possibly the fact that in the past couple of weeks—even taking sleep meds—I’ve averaged about five hours of sleep per night, and I’m just plain beat to hell.

The sore throat started coming on this morning—slowly, which makes me hope this won’t be a really terrible bout. (When I start getting The Throat in a matter of minutes I know I’m in for a long, hard slog.) As soon as I got home I took a hit of Nurofen Cold & Flu, a magic tablet found in the UK that works better than anything else I’ve ever found at treating symptoms.

(You can only get it in blister packs of max 24 tabs, so I hoard my stash for times like this. Whenever I go back I go from chemist to chemist buying up packets, because they won’t sell you more than one. Not because, as in the US, you might be running a meth lab, but because you might use them to commit suicide. Let me just say: give me a few days of the flu and death would be a relief.)

I actually got the shot this year because if I was going to get sick I wanted it to be now and not later in the month, when I’m on vacation.

Mission accomplished, damn it.