Feeling soooo sick, that's why I didn't write yesterday. I was too sick. Also, I went out for Mexican food and when I came back I just went to bed. I tried to make it to Puembo on time today, but I just couldn't. I ate my breakfast, got dressed, called the Leci and went back to sleep for two hours. Sometimes, that's gotta happen. Once I got my act together I made it to ICRP and things went pretty normally.
I had missed the opening procedures: the giving of appointments, the opening cabinets and doors, the temperature check on the two vaccine freezers. All the paitents were weighted and measured and the doctors were giving out perscriptions like candy. There were far fewer adultos de tecer edad for influenza vaccines. However, four really really old people from the Mora family all came in, all claming to be each other's cousins. The second Maria Mora acredited the lack of old people coming in to the dance class going on at the old folks home that morning. We're going to the old folks' home (asilio, same word for mental asylum) tomorrow, so I hope there is not bialoterapia class then.
I really like working with the old people. They are usually very sweet, patient, and eager. Mothers have babies that cry and little kids that get restless, and people with jobs want to get back to them. But the elderly people have usually devoted their entire morning to making it to the health center and getting the shot. They are in no hurry.
They support each other. Several times a person who has already gotten the vaccine comes back with a friend or neighbor who is less self sufficient. I came into the clinic today to see a very old woman in a wheelchair. I asked if she needed help getting up the stairs. She told me that she was waiting for her daughter-in-law to get vaccinated, then asked me politely if I could vaccinate her. The daughter-in-law was 69, the mother-in-law was 87. They both had chins full of white whiskers.
Several patients come in daily or very often for blood pressure checks. Most of them don't really understand how thier blood pressure works, but they all know that smaller numbers are better. one man who comes in every day says that he will bring another person wih him each day for thier vaccination.
I had my first needle stick today. I was loading up a syringe to give to the Leci to inject, when it popped out of the bottle too fast at poked my index finger. It hurt surprisingly badly and bleed a lot too, making me feel more sympathy for all these old people whose skinny arms we are blithly plunging needles into. There was no risk of infection at all, it was a new needle. I might have given myself 100th of a flu vaccination, but I'm pretty sure I bled that out. But it was scary, to be so close to wounding myself, a medical procedure I'm not qualified to give, to contamination and all those stories about dirty needles.
After I washed it and wrapped it in cotton, I hid out in the archives room for a while, putting files back in place. It stopped bleeding quickly and I can't even see the mark now, but I remember the adrenaline, the spot of blood, putting the cover on that needle and putting it in the sharps disposal as fast as I possibly could.
However, there's a cool part to this scary story. The SCS or the Ministry of Public Health in general, I guess, has gotten these new needles for vaccinations that are one of the best public health and harm prevention measures I've ever seen. It's single-use syringes! And I don't just mean that they are thowing them away after one use, I mean that it is physically impossible to use them more than once. You pull the cap off, fill it up, push the plunger down and it is impossible to pull back up! Even if you go half way down, there's no going back. This makes it easy to give the whole shot, but it's also a failsafe way to prevent multiple needle usage.
You might think that this is wasteful, and I won't argue there. But needles are one of those things that are supposed to be wasted. Toilet paper? No. Food? No. I'm a supporter of if its yellow let it mellow and re-using plastic bags and all that. But as soon as I stick my runny nose into a medical buliding, I want it all thrown away. Gloves, masks, q-tips, and most certainly needles. And when I see track marks, which I have, and most certainly will see in pretty much any of my job options for the future, I want to focus on the addiction that caused them, not on the sickness that could result.
From an ecological prespective, single-use syringes are a bad idea. But, if you look bigger, vaccines themselves are a bad idea: they make a weaker herd, more people thowing things away and buying cars and cutting holes in the ozone layer. These elderly people shouldn't even have lived as long as they have, and they shouldn't make it past this flu season if they aren't strong enough. But from a harm-reduction persective, which is the -ology in which I find the answers closer to the meaning-of-life question, it makes perfect, beautiful sense.
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