Shooting at the influenza, bang bang.

My doctor is still missing, as I reported before Christmas, but rather than sell his practice, he has his office making referrals to a nurse practitioner. Well, this damned sciatica is cramping my style something fierce, so I made an appointment to see her.

I have nothing against nurses, or NPs, but when you're in pain you kind of want a full-fledged doctor. However, when you're in a lot of pain, you kinda want anyone. If the insurance company said I had no option but to see a fourteen-year-old chiropractor and his sidekick, a Chihuahua named Mister Barks, I'd give it a shot.

My concerns were quickly dismissed by the professionalism of the NP in question, and after all, I wasn't there to have a railroad spike surgically removed from my temporal lobe; this was simply a call for discussion and referral to a physical therapist, as I anticipated. Also some muscle relaxants to help me stop yelping like Mister Barks every time I roll over in my sleep. Of course, while I was there I was offered a flu shot, and I figured okay, why the heck not.

Like a lot of people, I don't usually bother getting the flu shot unless I happen to be in the doctor's office and it's offered to me. It's the "You want fries with that?" of modern healthcare. Every year we seem to hear how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention really, honestly almost nailed the viruses chosen for the vaccine this time, but were juuuuust a little outside, and so now everyone's sick, even the ones who got the flu shot. It doesn't really happen that way, but that's how it sounds in the press.

Skeptic that I am -- not about vaccines in general but about the efficacy of the flu shot -- I have been taking the idea more seriously this year anyway. Why? Because the CDC makes an excellent point, that when a (mostly) healthy and (kinda) strong and (not so) young and (perhaps) manly man like myself gets the flu, it might just be a bad couple of days off and no big deal -- but I could accidentally spread it to people who have weakened immune systems, or who are very young or very old, and that would be bad. If I get the shot, it is that much less likely I will become Typhoid Freddy.

Also, and more selfishly, "even when the match is not perfect, flu vaccine still reduces the risk of severe illness and death," reports Harvard Health. I have seen in the news that if I get a different strain of the flu, the symptoms and duration may still be lessened by having the shot. Good enough for me, especially since there are fears that this may be an especially severe flu season before it's all over.

So if you're in the United States and you are not on the don't-shoot list, I suggest you get the shot if you haven't. You can get it at CVS, and they'll even give you a complimentary gigantic receipt to remember the day. You can use it as a throw blanket! Win-win!