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yellow fever vaccine goose chase
Thursday, April 13 2017
The new cat Charles was sleeping pleasantly next to me on the bed this morning. He has a loud purr, though it's not as loud as Oscar's. He's also much lighter than Oscar, so when he walks across your chest you don't feel like he might crack rib. But he's not a completely normal cat. Unpredictably, he'll suddenly lash out at whoever is nearby. This morning that whoever was Oscar, whom he'd just been affectionately rubbing his face against. Suddenly Charles hissed and swatted at Oscar and then dove off the far side of the bed. It all happened so quickly that Oscar never overcame his considerable inertia to respond in any way. Celeste the Cat (aka "the Baby") was on the floor near where Charles landed after that incident, and, it's important to mention, she has been the biggest holdout in our household regarding the acceptance of Charles. This performance did nothing but reinforce Celeste's hostility, and she began to growl the way Julius (aka "Stripey") used to when he'd hear sounds that suggested an unfamiliar dog. Celeste wasn't going to attack, but it was clear what her views were regarding the normalization of Charles in our household.
I had another morning chore that I had to complete before starting my workday. I had to drive to a faceless building in Uptown Kingston where an outpost for a faceless corporation called LabCorp resides. I had to go there and get some blood drawn so blood work could be done. I'd called ahead to set up an appointment, which meant I got to leapfrog the other schmucks who showed up when I did. There was still a brief wait in the waiting area (which felt more like chairs in a hallway). LabCorp was on the first floor of a concrete building, so there was no cellphone signal inside. Fortunately, there was a WiFi network provided for guests. I was sitting there flicking things on my smartphone for a minute or so before a very young woman came in holding a one-hand baby carrier that didn't seem to burden her much. I assumed there was a baby in it, but no baby sounds came from the carrier. Women with babies always end up being cooed over by someone, and inevitably a middle-aged woman started talking to the young mother. The first thing the middle-aged woman said was, naturally, that the baby was beautiful. I glanced over and finally saw the poor thing, a pink baby with closed eyes and no apparent signs of life. It was not beautiful. It turned out it was a premature baby. "I can tell," replied the middle-aged womn, "I'm a nurse." The mother had been in a hospital a month before the baby was born and after the baby was born she wasn't allowed to be with the baby until the last day of its hospitalization, which went on for a month or two. Now the baby was three months old. It had had bleeding in the brain, but things were good now. As this conversation happened, I tried to visit websites on my phone and ignore the conversation, but all I could think was the following thought: "These are some low-information people." That was probably a harsh view, and it might well have been wrong, but it was what I thought at the time. I felt better as the highly-competent white-haired woman rapidly processed my paperwork. There was a radio on at the time and it mentioned a news item about Donald Trump engineering something against Planned Parenthood, and the highly-competent white haired lady let out an existential sigh indicating her disapproval. I should've said something in support, but I was in pure-observer mode and didn't want to tamper with the things I was observing. As for the actual drawing of the blood, though it involved a needle going into that vein on the inside of my right elbow, it wasn't really even painful, though three largish syringes were filled with my blood. The woman doing that job was so competent that I felt the need to praise her afterwards.
In August, Gretchen and I will be flying to Uganda. In order to get a visa to go there, I must've been vaccinated for yellow fever. Gretchen had said something vague about going to a drug store and getting a yellow fever vaccination like it's no big deal. Yesterday I'd tried going into the CVS on Washington Ave. and asking for a yellow fever vaccine. The woman working at the pharmacy had no idea what I was talking about. I said that my wife had gotten a vaccine recently, so she looked through the records and could find no evidence of it. Huh. Later I learned from Gretchen that the pharmacy providing yellow fever vaccines was Walgreens. So that was where I went today. The woman at the counter wasn't too familiar with yellow fever vaccines, and after a little research determined that I would need a doctor's prescription for such a thing. "My wife got a yellow fever inoculation within the last week," I claimed, thinking that was true. But when the cashier when through the paperwork, she found no evidence that anyone had received a yellow fever inoculation in recent memory. If I were Gretchen, I might've been able to bluff my way to getting an inoculation (as I thought at this point she must have) but I'm not. "Is there anything else I can help you with?" was the sign that my options were up. I'd been fasting all morning because that's what you're supposed to do prior to providing a blood sample, so I bought a bag of potato chips (the lower-fat baked kind) on my way out the door. Back at the house, I learned from Gretchen that in fact she had never had a yellow fever inoculation in recent times, and thus had never been to any of the local drug stores to obtain such services. Apparently her yellow fever vaccine from when she was a tiny baby the last time she'd been in Uganda (just prior to her family's fleeing in the aftermath of one of Idi Amin's anti-semitic decrees) was still valid. It was only me who needed a vaccine, and getting one would apparently be more complicated than she had imagined.
This evening, I removed a large cardboard box from near the southeast corner of the laboratory in preparation for repainting a part of the floor that has been covered by the box since 2013. I then repainted the dark blue shapes. Soon thereafter, Celeste (aka "the Baby") appeared, looking traumatized but relieved. Apparently she'd seen Charles the Cat out in the teevee room and had rushed past him to seek sanctuary in the laboratory. But, of course, her natural inclination was to step through the wet paint I'd just applied to the floor. Somehow I convinced her to join me on the other side of the laboratory, where her non-cuddly friendliness seemed so refreshingly normal in comparison to whatever it is that Charles does. Somehow I talked her down to the point where, later, on encountering Charles again near the top of the stairs, she sniffed his nose and didn't make any belligerent noises. That seemed to Gretchen and me as progress. Maybe Charles is a weirdo, but it's possible that, like an awkward falling Tetris piece, he'll find a way to fit in.
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