Not Missing Our Shot(s)

At least one of the countries we’re planning to visit has specific vaccination requirements that aren’t part of the standard US menu and there are several other diseases available in Africa and Asia that sound like No Fun At All. So a key item on my to-do list was getting the three of us to a travel clinic.

I attempted to contact the travel clinic that several of my seasoned traveller friends recommend, only to find out that it closed in early June. Then I tried to call the clinic at the hospital that’s part of the same network as our PCP, only to discover that it has also closed. In theory there is still one doctor there providing travel consultations, but voicemail to their office is not returned. So I started searching and found that the Cambridge Health Alliance has a travel clinic that has recently moved into new digs near Wellington Circle and they were happy to book us in for this week. We’re lucky that Alice is over eighteen, because they don’t treat children—I find myself wondering what you’re supposed to do in that case, but luckily I don’t have to figure that out.

In theory we had consecutive appointments, but they just brought all three of us in for a joint consultation, which made sense, since we’re all going to the same places. We got a lot of information and I asked a lot of questions, which made the doctor ask what I do for a living, which led to a tangent about where he should take his kids to try out theatre in the area. But then we got back to all the things that we might want to protect ourselves against, one way and another, and agreed on a plan for injections and prescriptions and the doctor turned us over to the nurse.

At that point we figured out that they only had two doses of the Chikungunya vaccine and they recommended doing that one at the same time as the other live vaccine, for Yellow Fever, and since I have the most flexible schedule at the moment, I let the others go first and will swing back next week for more jabbing.

Injections are very hard for Alice, but she was incredibly brave and the nurse was really compassionate and calm and did a great job getting us through it. Needles hold no fear for me, luckily enough, so my own three jabs were quickly done while Jason was in another room getting all five of his. We’ve all been pretty stiff and tender around the injection sites this evening, but that’s already getting better and I hope we’ll avoid any other side effects. And once I get my last two jabs we’ll be protected from Typhoid, Yellow Fever, Chikungunya, and Japanese Encephalitis and I can tick off “travel clinic” on my Big List of Dealing, all of which is a big relief!