i paid for this sickness, it's all mine!

I took my last dose of typhoid about an hour and a half ago, which means that soon I will be able to eat some dinner and go to bed. Have I mentioned how much I love travel vaccinations? No, seriously. Going in for my shots makes the trip real for me and satisfies my silly tough butch self-image at the same time. Especially on days like last Tuesday, where the nurse made a point of telling me she was giving me my Td booster right in the middle of that big tattoo. "Td" is of course the adult formulation of the tetanus-plus-diphtheria vaccines; but I still like calling it "DipTet".

The Td was funny in and of itself, mostly because it gave me the chance, at work later in the afternoon, to beg off any job requiring too much charm. I'm having tetanus, I told my manager. Don't make me talk to guests. I also discovered that several of my co-workers--intelligent people all--were not aware that you're supposed to get your Td updated every ten years. So we had some discussion about poking each other with rusty nails and then got back to work.

I feel silly that I'm proud of what the nurse said as she looked over my yellow traveler's vaccination card to see what else she might need to give me. Hep A, good. Hep B, good. Ah, you've had the rabies series? And I appreciate that she didn't make fun of my having gotten vaccinated against Japanese encephalitis, once upon a time.

Everyone else does.