Flu shot

Do you get flu shots? H1N1 vaccine?

  • Never get a flu shot and won't this year.

    Votes: 45 54.9%
  • Get one every year...I'm a repeat customer!

    Votes: 9 11.0%
  • Only regular flu shot.

    Votes: 7 8.5%
  • Only H1N1 this year.

    Votes: 2 2.4%
  • I'll get both H1N1 and the regular flu shot.

    Votes: 12 14.6%
  • I think it's all a bunch of BS.

    Votes: 22 26.8%

  • Total voters
    82
  • Poll closed .
never had a flu shot and don't plan on getting one ever! i try and wash my hands as much as possible when im out in public places,best way not to catch stuff
 
I don't think i have ever got a flu shot. Maybe back in high school before I really remember.. Don't really get sick all that often, and I dont really talk all that many precautions. I'll wash my hands after going to the bathroom, but don't really bother to wash them before going to lunch or anything :dunno: Never have and dont particularly plan on starting any time soon.

Yeah I catch a cold once or twice a year, but normally that is it. I tend to get a cold at the beginning of the fall (nowish... I can feel it coming on, doesnt help that I am trying to quit smoking at the same time :banghead:) and toward the end of the winter/early spring. No clue why I get the spring cold, but it always hits, then clears just in time for allergies. What joy.

The problem is that when I get sick... I get sick. Only times I recall getting sick was back in December '04 during finals week my freshman year of college. I was sick enough that the school nurse gave me a shot that knocked me out. Now I am a relatively big guy (6' 225ish lbs) and the shot knocked me out for 20 hours.. I got the shot just after I woke up from 15 hours of sleep/rest to try and get over the sickness.. I have never felt so rested before :D Slept through 2 days of finals though so the rest of the week sucked for makeups (thank god I got the nurses letter and was allowed to do the makeups).

Only other time I have been sick lately was 1 or 2 years ago. My kid brother (or sister, cant remember which) was sick with something and somehow I got it while I was home for the summer, so it wasn't even flu season. I woke up at 5 AM and :puke: then went back to bed. at 6:30 I got up feeling fine ready to go to work. I ended up staying home and by 8 or 9 AM apparently I was all sorts of messed up. Talking to myself and that was just the start of it from what I heard.

No matter what sickness I get I am fine the next day it seems. 24 hour thing. Longest I was ever down due to sickness was that last summer illness. I took 2 days out of work just incase something came back and hit me mid day the next day (plus I was sick on a thurs so taking friday off too got me a long wkend. I couldnt complain :D)
 
The Army is trying to get me, but I've been dodging the medics. I'm hearing rumors that Ft Bliss is running low on supplies and I go on leave in 3 weeks, so I might get lucky.
 
Haven't had a flu shot since '92 (battalion doc cornered me that day). Managed to get through the next 6ish years of service without getting one (connections indeed help). Haven't had one since. Haven't had the flu since high school.

Read a bit lately about mercury as an ingredient (flu & H1N1), though it seems only in the multi-dose vials. Apparently single doses don't have any(as much?) mercury. One article trying to dispel fears of mercury poisoning (and possibly autism in children/fetus) saying that the shots only contain about as much as a tuna sandwich. That may be, but when was the last time you had your tuna sandwich injected into your blood stream?
 
Got one when I was nine - sickest I'd been up to that point (and that included double pneumonia after recovering from respiratory poison ivy. Yech.)

Got one again my first year in the AF - three days later, laid me out for a month. Got a note from the doc - next year, I didn't get one. Didn't get sick. The year after that, I didn't get one. I caught - I was out three days. Three years after that - didn't get sick.

So, I look at it this way - if I get the shot, I can look forward to being down for a month no trouble. If I don't get the shot, the odds have been about one in five that I'll catch - and I'm only down for a week, tops (if history is any indicator.)

The last time I'd really gotten ill was getting bilateral pneumonia - from being flat-arsed while knitting a lot of fairly major bones for six week. And even that was better than the two bouts of grippe I've had after being supposedly immunised.

I'm not high risk, so that's in my favour. My wife, on the other hand, is considered "high risk" - 50+/asthmatic. As of Friday past, my mother-in-law is beyond such concerns (much to my wife's distress and my overall relief. Taking care of that woman took eight full days a week of my time, and kept me busier than a cat with two tails. This isn't really the way I wanted to free us up - I wanted to get a better taste of it before it came all the way - but we'll get through it. I only did my level best to keep this off out of my love for my wife, rather than any affection for her mother. She and I were mutually antagonistic...) However, it was neither the emphysema (which I was managing rather effectively) or the lung cancer (recent diagnosis, caught it early, and we were planning pinpoint radiation) that did her in. It was a C. diff infection caused primarily by being on and off of antibiotics for various respiratory bugs that got her. Nothing I could do about that (and I put a lot of work into trying to prevent her getting pneumonia - but she never did listen to me worth a damn.)
 
So just for fun, how many people do you guys think have died from getting the flu shot this year?

-Alex

more than you would think I would guess. I may ask the flight doc that today if I see him. That is not a statistic that is going to get a lot of coverage in any news organization, since all of them are endorsing the shot.
 
Cause of death rank: 7th leading cause of death in 1999 and 2000 is "pneumonia/influenza" (CDC)
 
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