Vaccination Blues

Please be aware that this post has roughly 493% more self-pity than the average Empirical Question post. Side effects of reading this post may include: annoyance, scoffing, compassion, fear of shots, and empathetic bodily discomfort. Those with low tolerances should skip to the end "Note" for musings on inadpt-seeming usage of urban slang.

I had a Tdap vaccination (tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis = whooping cough) at the doctor's office Wednesday afternoon, which I would not have done had I realized that I would have all of the side effects they warned about and that they would make me miserable and mostly non-functional for all of the next day. From the handout they gave me:

* Pain
* Fever
* Headache
* Tiredness
* Nausea
* Stomach ache
* Body aches
* Sore joints

I am not unfamiliar with any of these symptoms, which I experience on a fairly regular basis due to other maladies, but the combined impact was worse than I am used to.

Specifically, the "pain" was of a different sort. Most of my pain is of a constant, throbbing, or wave nature, and I had that this time, but I also experienced pain in my left arm (thank god I was intelligent enough to get the shot in the left arm!) that was sudden, intense, and surprising. I would get this shooting pain whenever I tried to lift or pull anything with my left arm or merely move it around much at all - enough to make me call out even when I was home alone and communicating my distress would have no effect in getting me help or sympathy, and I almost never do that. (Well, Leo was here, of course, but I did not yell so loudly that he would be able to hear me from his own room, that I could not get into because I was too weak etc. to climb over the barrier gate - anyway, he is pretty much indifferent to this kind of stuff).

It was strange how many normal things were impossible to do because I could not force myself to endure the pain to do them or could only barely manage to do them through the pain, and sometimes requiring multiple attempts or stages. Having two functional arms is really handy and highly recommended. This gave me a new appreciation of the suckitude of Tam's neck problems from last year. Pain + disability = waaaaaah.

This morning around 4:30, I realized that my entire body was no longer pulsing with pain and that I was no longer limited to lying on my back or rotated slightly onto my right side, and I feel asleep feeling hopeful. I woke up at 8:00 and was able to make and eat breakfast and, with some effort and endurance, shower and dress myself. I am now back to normal except for moderate throbbing in my left arm, the occasional burst of pain when doing too much with that arm, residual aching in the knees (which happens to me easily), and a quite stiff and sore neck and shoulders from having held myself so awkwardly to avoid pain from using my left arm. This constitutes a vast improvement that has me off the disability list.

Since it appears that adults only need to get Tdap vaccines every ten years, at least this will suffice for a grad school vaccination requirement, if it exists. I don't want to think right now about any other required vaccinations that I may still have ahead of me. Ouch.

Note: I originally wrote DL for disability list above (a baseball reference) but looking at it again, I was conscious of DL standing for being on the down low. When I was at Robert's mom's house, their local paper had a column in the fluff section in which the writer used the term "down low" in describing something that a female celebrity wanted to keep secret, which struck me as ... odd. I have never heard "down low" used outside the context of straight (usually married or partnered) men having sex with other men while not considering themselves gay or bisexual.

Counter to my expectations, this source suggests that the general secret meaning preceded the specific male-male sex meaning. I wonder if the author knows about this sexual connotation and chose to use the phrase anyway. It was overall a kind of funny thing to see in a mainstream city newspaper, given that the demographics of newspaper readers slants older and I wouldn't expect most of them to necessarily be up on this kind of slang. What do you guys think of when you see "DL" or "down low"?