A pharmacist hurt me the other day. She seemed like a nice enough person, and was very professional about it. But she definitely hurt me. I don’t normally mind getting shots. I just look the other way and pretend I’m somewhere else. But it turns out that the Hepatitis A/B combo has more viscosity than, say, a flu shot. When she jabbed me with the needle, and slowly injected the double vaccine, it hurt. I’m please to report that I took it like a man. Except when I said, “Ouch! That hurts.”

It had to be done, I suppose. We were about seven week away from our Ecuador vacation, and the CDC strongly recommends that people traveling to Ecuador be inoculated against Hepatitis A, Hepatitis B, Typhoid and Yellow Fever. We’ re skipping the Yellow Fever vaccination because it is needed only if you plan on visiting the Amazon jungle on the east side of the Andes Mountains. We don’t. If we eventually decide to move to Ecuador to live, we will get the Yellow Fever vaccination as well, since we would likely want to see Amazonia while we were there.

The Typhoid vaccination was interesting. It isn’t administered as a shot. It’s administered as four capsules that have to be refrigerated and taken at precise 48 hour intervals. With no food two hours before or one hour after, just to make it challenging to work around meals and such. They didn’t present me with any particular problems, but Trueda was not so fortunate. After all, this is Trueda’s body we are talking about. Those of you who know her know what I’m talking about; if there are possible bad reactions to be had, her body latches on to them it like a leach and says, “Mine!”  Anyway, she experienced debilitating stomach pain after the first one, which she reported to her doctor, who told her to stop taking them immediately. Then she went in and got a Typhoid shot. They hadn’t mentioned the shot before. Apparently it is good for only two years, while the capsules are good for five. Trueda said, “Two years is good. I’ll go with that.” Heck, if they had mentioned it earlier, I would have gone for that too.

We get to go back in a couple weeks for a second Hepatitis A/B vaccination. I am so looking forward to it.