I got a flu shot the other day. This is an effective and inexpensive way to avoid a lot of misery. I remember getting the flu when I was 3. My brother (who was 2) brought it home from the hospital when he had his tonsils out. In 1962, they didn't know the flu was contagious, I guess, so he was sharing a semi-private room with another 2-year-old who had the flu.
I don't remember being miserable then. All I remember is that my sister and I had the flu, and my brother (who was over it) got to spend the night with our grandparents.
After that, my parents coughed up the money for 3 kid-sized flu shots every year. I suspect that my Mother was more miserable those few days than any of us kids.
The last shot I got was when I was in college, but still living at home. I took advantage of the student health-fee that I had paid one semester and, although it was unusual, I managed to get out of the Health Center without them giving me a bottle of codeine cough medicine.
Then I got married, graduated, had a baby (well, my wife Jacquelyn did that part), and moved away. (Who says you can't make a long story short?) Flu shots seemed unnecessary. Then one Saturday I got out of bed, and began to hurt in a way that I never remembered hurting before. I got back in bed, and several hours passed before I figured out that this was not the verge of death, but rather, something I had not experienced since I was 3.
I hurt all over. All over I hurt. And I hurt all over. This lasted until about 4:00 p.m., this hurting all over, and then I was finally able to get out of bed, being only sore. The next year, I got a flu shot. I get them about every other year now.
So the other day, I got my semi-annual flu shot, and the nurse put this cloth adhesive bandage on my arm. You have to be extremely careful when you take those things off, because they hurt much worse than the ones you can buy at the store. If you follow the advice that some people give… "rip it off really fast and it won't hurt as long…," it'll hurt so badly that you'll wish you had the flu instead.
I'm trying to figure out why they make these things. There are two possibilities.
One is that it doesn't cost the bandage company anything to make them, and by giving them to hospitals and doctors' offices, they can claim that more hospitals and doctors use their brand. The reason they don't cost anything is that the cloth comes from old clothes.
Jacquelyn regularly donates used clothing to the various groups who call us offering to come pick the stuff up. Her stuff, of course, goes to some needy person. My stuff, on the other hand, is so used up that the charitable organization has to pay an adhesive bandage company to come haul it off.
A second possibility is that these bandages come from the R & D department.
Once, Jacquelyn was stopped in the mall ("Would you like to take a survey?"), and she came home with tons of facial tissue samples. Some of these seemed fairly normal, but some were actually birthday party paper napkins without the Transformers decorations, which are much better suited to cleaning up after kids than for getting you through a cold. Anyway, we were to evaluate these tissues, then send in a form with our opinions.
This won't work with adhesive bandages, because unless you have a three-year-old, you probably only go through about one box every 6 years. They would get tired of waiting for your form to come back.
In order to test the adhesive, the bandage company, or perhaps the adhesive company, must give the bandages to hospitals and doctors, who will put them on the arms of people getting flu shots.
We (the public) are probably letting the bandage company down, because I know that I, for one, have never called in my results. From now on, all of us need to let the doctor's office… sorry… the HMO, know that THESE THINGS HURT WHEN YOU TAKE THEM OFF! If we shirk our responsibility, then the bandage company will assume that these things are good, and pretty soon we'll see them on the shelves.
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