Scoring the Shot

I have to say for much of the swine flu/H1N1 scare I stayed pretty relaxed. I was relaxed in the spring, I was relaxed over the summer. But when fall hit, I was no longer even close to being relaxed about it. The first panic hit when our family got a horrible cold. It wasn't H1N1 as far as I know because none of us had a fever. But it was a bad upper respiratory thing. I ended up with bronchitis, Owen had pneumonia and Colin had bronchitis and conjunctivitis. It was brutal. So all I could imagine was that if H1N1 was WORSE than that, we were in for a bad run.

Then I started reading article after article of the effects of H1N1 on pregnant women. With my history of having bad upper respiratory infections, getting over bronchitis AND being pregnant, I was just plain scared. I read that only 1% of our country is pregnant at any one time, but 6% of H1N1 deaths were pregnant women. That is a sobering statistic to put it mildly.

So I was on a mission to "score" the shot. I spent one afternoon last week scouring the internet and making phone calls prepared to drive as far as I needed to drive to get a vaccine. I finally found a phone number for a local health department. A very nice woman answered and I must have been one of the first people to call because she quickly scheduled Colin, Owen and I all to receive shots on November 2nd. The first clinic in our area. So I was happy with that for the moment.

But at the same time I was really hoping to at least get myself vaccinated as soon as possible, if it was possible to get one sooner. Somehow I stumbled on an article from a Philadelphia paper about an H1N1 clinic in South Jersey for only pregnant women. I called and it didn't seem that I had to live in the county to get a shot, so I took a chance and the boys and I drove 1 hours 15 minutes one way for me to get the shot on Friday.

I will say it was extremely well organized and we were in and out in ten minutes. So far, no side effects from the shot and I'm glad I got it. And so thankful that a county health department put together a clinic for pregnant women. The boys still have a week until theirs, but hopefully after that I can breath a sigh of relief and put that worry away for a little while. I scored the shot.