Skip to main content

The Flu Shot


This morning's Burlington Free Press showed several pictures of hundreds of people who had lined up at Colchester High School on Saturday morning (some as early as 4:00 AM, one with seven week old baby tucked in a down jacket!!) to wait for the H1N1 flu vaccine. Yikes! It's one thing to line up in the wee hours outside of WalMart on Black Friday to score the latest "Tickle Me Elmo" or "wii" system (not something I would ever do, BTW), but this is flu vaccine. Have we not been hearing about the "swine flu" threat for at least the past three years? Fox News assures us that we, in the USA, have the best health care system in the entire world. So how is it that there is not enough vaccine by now? FOX, POX!

A couple of days ago, we went to the cemetery in Graniteville, Vt, to visit the grave of Mike's grandfather, who died in the 1919 flu pandemic. Harvey Hebert was 28 years old at the time of his death. A flu pandemic is not something we are really taking lightly, but shouldn't we also have the expectation that we, as a society, have progressed beyond the medical knowledge of the early twentieth century? Remember, experts were predicting this.

I have had the flu for sure three times in my life, and maybe a fourth time. It is not fun. Now, I am not in a "high risk" category so I will not have a flu shot this year, but one of the things I am doing is avoiding crowds (like in a four hour line for a flu shot) and using the disinfectant wipes at stores and other public places.

Since I have an herb garden, I use this recipe for disinfecting around the house--and its green:


VINEGAR OF THE FOUR THIEVES ( the story is that grave robbers rubbed this concoction on themselves in an effort to avoid illness)




2 quarts apple cider vinegar, handfuls of lavender, rosemary, sage, rue, and mint


Mix all in a large jar with a tight lid and let sit for four weeks or longer.


Strain herbs and pour liquid into spray bottle.

Labels:

Comments

  1. Arkansas PattiNovember 9, 2009 at 7:52 AM

    I have had the same thoughts about the lines to get shots being a great way to get the flu.
    I'm in the "you are on your own" age group also.
    People forget that 36,000 die each year from plain old flu. That stat surprised me.
    Don't have all the ingredients for your preventive spray. Sounds interestin.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I appreciate readers' comments so much. You don't even always have to agree with me.

Popular posts from this blog

It's TIme

 It's been a while since I have posted anything and even my reading your posts is falling by the wayside. I am in Florida now. I have a yard where little attention was spent on landscaping for the past years so I am slowly and (somewhat) methodically addressing that. I also volunteer to work at the pollinator garden and the edible garden I helped install at the UU grounds and I took over the volunteer job of cleaning out the overgrown community garden by my neighborhood mailboxes. The neighbor who was doing that got sick and could no longer attend to it. It's a bigger job than I'd thought at first -- not only overgrown with weeds, but the plants that are wanted there are in life and death competition for each others' spaces. And two walks a day, morning and evening, so Levi can keep up with addiction to canine social media and a daily rousing came of stick or ball midday take up another chunk of my time. I have a weekly meditation group that I co-facilitate, and my own ...
10 comments
Read more

New Furniture

 We went shopping for a new couch. I liked this one, the first store we went to. Of course it would be an impulse to buy the first one so we trekked around to other stores -- something we liked more, a better deal? No surprise that we ended up going back to that first store the next day and purchasing that couch for our living room. Also a matching love seat for the den where we watch TV. Because I had replaced my old love seat with two recliners. We couldn't keep three households worth of furniture after all. Well, my recliner was not big enough to accommodate both Levi and me. Poor boy had to watch TV from his bed on the floor. There! This is much better! Spoiled much? The little tail on the floor belongs to his toy squirrel, Buddy. It's like having a toddler with the need to be picking up toys or risk tripping over them. But his very favorite play thing is that bathmat that can be found anywhere but the bathroom floor.
10 comments
Read more

Walking

 I have always been a walker. Now that I have a high energy dog there is no excuse for not getting out there. And the weather is not an interfering factor here. Early morning and early evening are our preferred times so even when it gets hot we should be okay. We can get quite a long walk going around the neighborhood, greeting neighbors out working in their yards or walking their own dogs. But the landscape changes quickly just beyond the confines of the housing developments. It could be described as natural Florida or as sites of future housing developments. I do prefer the first option. And I really enjoy being out in natural areas so I often opt to head to a nature setting. I would have liked to put a picture here. Unfortunately my iPhone has made a unilateral decision. It will no longer be sending my photos to my computer. Why? I have no idea. However, we may be walking along happily enough -- me listening to the birds or trying to identify wildflowers and other plants while L...
10 comments
Read more