(This is another of those occasional Asides which are only a little about CLIPPERS.)
I went for my flu jab last week; I've only started having them since being treated for CLIPPERS so this is only the second. In the UK the good old NHS ensures that as a member of an at-risk population I automatically get an invite to get one for free at my local clinic. So I've had the jab and it was all very straight-forward and no trouble at all. Now I'm wondering what I've been exposed to along the way.
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| Cover mouth, cough, then wash hands. |
I made the appointment and showed up at the clinic. Which was full. Of people coughing - half of them seemed to have flu already even though it was a special flu-jab day. So I checked in and sat down away from the worst of the splutterers. The check-in at my practice is computerised - there is a touch screen and when you arrive you click the relevant brightly-coloured button to select "male" or "female" and your date of birth, after which it identifies you and asks if it has found the right appointment. So far, so good. Perhaps because I got used to it in hospital, I automatically used the handwash next to the screen and sat down for my appointment. I didn't have to wait long, probably 5 minutes or so. However in that time a steady stream of people checked in at the same screen and not one of them used the handwash before or after coughing and touching the screen (or anything else). Given that everyone in the room was in an "at risk of infection" category (about 90% were pensioners and the rest pregnant women) they didn't seem to be taking many precautions. If any one of them had been exposed to Norovirus for instance then this packed room seemed an ideal place to transmit it. Anyway, pretty soon I made it into the injection room and once I'd convinced them I really was supposed to be there (not being elderly or pregnant) the jab itself was barely noticeable.
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| Next year I'm taking more precautions. |
I'm not about to turn into Michael Jackson and wear gloves and a facemask everywhere. Still having had a few bugs in my time and not wanting any more while my immune system is compromised I think I'm entitled to be a bit paranoid.
Read other articles in this series at Living With CLIPPERS.
Living With CLIPPERS by Bill Crum is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
