My Arm Hurts
Just Get the Shot
I got a Tetanus shot yesterday and, boy, does my arm hurt! It was my annual check-up. I couldn’t remember the last time I had one, so to be safe, they gave me the vaccine. My arm has hurt all day. So much worse than the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine!
It has led me to contemplate vaccines today. When your arm is hurting and you keep rubbing the big bump on it to try to make it feel better, you tend to think about vaccines.
I still don’t understand how they became such a political thing. Of course, the Covid vaccine has been made political, but we all know that vaccines in general were political before that. I don’t really want to get in the middle of that. I’m just “thinking out loud” really.
What a place of privilege it is to be able to choose to not vaccinate your kids. There are people that I love who fall into that category, so I’m not talking about someone far off in the distance. I’m talking about loved ones. I am astonished by it all.
There are mothers (primarily mothers) who walk miles upon miles in “developing nations” in order to get to a clinic where a volunteer doctor can vaccinate their children. They are not ignorant. They have watched too many of their own children die. They are willing to go through a lot of work because they know that vaccines save lives. Vaccines will save their child’s life.
Have vaccines ever caused damage? I’m certain they have. But, compared to the good they do, I continue to be flabbergasted that someone who is privileged enough to live in a country that has more vaccines than it needs will not get into a car and drive a couple of minutes to get a shot for free that could help end this pandemic.
I digress.
This wasn’t going to be about the Covid vaccine. This was going to be about the fact that my arm is hurting. Not really that either. I’ve been wondering if people who choose to not get the Covid vaccine or choose to not vaccinate their children for school ever get a Tetanus shot. I’ve started thinking about vaccines in a whole different way these days. Do we have an increase in people dying from Tetanus because they won’t allow those antibodies into their body either?
Kid #1 had to go to the ER not long ago because he cut his hand. He needed a Tetanus shot because it had been so long since he had one. The ER doctor said, “Yeah, you don’t want to get that. That is a terrible way to die.”
I laughed. I laugh at most things. The kid laughed too. I guess we couldn’t believe he just came out and said such a thing. But, he was serious. He went on to describe in pretty specific detail to the kid what happens to your body when you get Tetanus without having an up-to-date vaccine. It sounded absolutely horrific.
Some folks blame God. They say that God gave them a temple of a body and that they trust God to take care of it and that they will not put foreign substances into it. I call BS. I think there are a lot of people who truly believe that is what they believe. But, they put a lot of other foreign substances into that temple. I, for one, consume a lot of Diet Pepsi. I would be hard-pressed to make an argument about putting anything else in my body when I’m willingly drinking those chemicals daily.
Like I said, I’m just thinking out loud here. I just don’t get it. I probably won’t ever get it. A colleague on FB today shared that his father is in the hospital with Covid. His dad called his mom and said, “If I had known it was going to be this bad, I would have just gotten the shot.”
Such a privileged place to be to refuse vaccines.
My arm still hurts. I am grateful.
