First day of fall, with fires blazing and flu season arriving D
riving around the Antelope Valley the past few days reminds me of cinema hellscapes out of Arnold Schwarzenegger movies like the first two “Terminator” movies and another oversize turkey he cooked up called “End of Days” about Armageddon.
I saw the roll-out of a brown smoke-choked cloud that looked like film from the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression. Next, I heard on the radio that the Devil’s Punchbowl Nature Center had been destroyed in the fire. It really saddened me, thinking about the times I brought my kids and their friends to Devil’s Punchbowl to open their world a bit, then hike in the accessible wild land.
I hoped the great Nature Center staff was able to evacuate its captive critters. It was the first time I ever felt sympathy for a rattlesnake, but I felt like I had gotten to know it, less like a friend, than an interesting acquaintance.
We have lived through weeks of brown sky, bad air, heat and then there’s the dread that COVID-19 imposes. And that is if you are mobile and healthy enough to be grateful for both. So, I bought my coffee at drive-thru and went home.
Officially, it is fall. That does not signal an end to wildfires blazing through hillsides and home sites like the devil’s wind. I respect the firefighters and anguish for those experiencing great loss. It’s a good time to donate or volunteer with the American Red Cross.
Fall arrives like the winter of our discontent and that means it is the season to get a flu shot.
A few days ago, I posted on social media, a poster from my colleagues at High Desert Medical Group. It was a cartoon of a syringe with a smiley face and the caption said, “Hit me with your best shot.”
It was cute and its intention was to raise awareness about the need for getting a flu shot.
One of the first comments came from a curmudgeon service buddy who said words to effect of, “I don’t take them. Never had a shot and never had the flu.”
I don’t argue with people. It’s like trying to reason with a fire. I posted a teary emoji and moved on. But I got to thinking. My service buddy is a good guy. He made it past 70 and still takes it outside for a smoke — which is a pretty good strategy for not making it to 80. I lost my brother to a pack a day before he hit Social Security eligibility.
Why do people act against their own self-interest? It is just a question. I do not confess to knowing the answer.
But I remembered that my buddy had not always eschewed vaccinations. In the service, you got the full work-up and it was not a discussion or debate. A religious objection cited by a buddy of mine won him a trip out to the “confidence course” for the rest of the afternoon and that was OK with the rest of us, bare-armed, waiting in our skivvies, for that shot battery that would keep us from getting the full battery of illnesses, tropical, exotic and conventional.
And that is why the military, backed by the best medical science as could be understood, lined us up. It was for the common good — to keep one troop from infecting a whole barracks full of troops.
That shot battery provides some of the reason that my leathery, tobacco-addicted buddy is still ambulatory.
Measles infecting the masses was bygone history in this country until the last few years, when a misinformed minority’s numbers grew to the point where the disease had a shot (pun intended) at resurging. And it did.
Along with all the anxieties everyone is carrying around, election panic, mistrust of the other team, of the other guy, of the guvmint, masks and science, there is also the worry over when or whether we will have a vaccine that can help turn the page on a pandemic that has killed 200,000 Americans, infected and sickened 6 million more and roams the country like a bat out of hell.
Meanwhile, we could act in our own interest and follow the doctor’s best advice, which is to get a flu shot. One of the questions on the Centers for Disease Control website is “Is it possible to contract COVID-19 and the flu at the same time?” The answer is, “yes.” Because COVID-19 remains an elusive beast, it’s clear that a double-tap of two respiratory illnesses that can kill you is not a strategy for quality of life.
Flu shots are available now at pharmacies, big box chain stores, doctors and from your health group. A flu shot would be “Algonquin Circle” author Dorothy Parker’s best way to avoid the question: “What fresh hell is this?”
It is already a mean season. There is no sane reason to make it worse for yourself and everyone else that you might care about.