This afternoon we went to our appointment at the Kaiser Adult Injections department to get our first round of vaccinations. Before making the appointment, I did a bunch of research at the Center for Disease Control website (www.cdc.gov) which was very helpful and suggested the following vaccinations for where we were going:
- Hepatitis A
- Hepatitis B
- Typhoid
- Japanese Encephalitis
- Polio
- Rabies
We sat out in the waiting room for about 30 minutes past the start of our appointment, presumably because the form we filled out when we checked in listed over a dozen countries we intended on visiting. When our names were called, we were led to a small, curtained off corner of the lab about the size of a walk-in closet. The nurse, a very nice woman in her late 50s with the intensity, volume and vocal timbre of a buzzsaw, asked us several questions about when we were leaving and how much time we expected to spend in rural areas. Though we we never farther than an arm’s length from one another, one had to assume that her questions were also being addressed to an assembled crowd, 50 yards behind us.
Based on our discussions with her, we learned the following:
- Japanese Encephalitis was only recommended if we were expecting to spend time in and around rice paddies for more than a month. Though we are certainly hoping to visit some areas like that, we’re not planning on making it a long term stop, so we were told we didn’t need that one.
- You can’t get a rabies shot at the moment unless you’ve already been bitten. There’s a shortage of the drug and so no one, “not even zookeepers” are being given vaccinations now. We’ll check back on that before we leave.
Though she was loud, she was fantastic at giving shots and the entire course of Hepatitis A & B, Tetanus and Polio took maybe 30 seconds – and even Anjel who has, what she recognizes to be, an unfounded fear of needles, survived the experience.
Hepatitis B is a multi-course vaccine, but she put us on an accelerated schedule for the shots so rather than taking several months, we should be done by the end of March. We were given a prescription for an oral vaccine for Typhoid that we’ll be starting tomorrow. The vaccinations we’ve got are good everywhere except most of Africa, where we would need to get additional shots against Yellow Fever and Meningitis. Other than that we’re cleared to travel the world!
