Roll up your sleeve

I dropped by my local Safeway early this morning, planning to get my annual flu shot.  I was too early, in fact, as the pharmacy counter hadn't yet opened.  But I'll get it tomorrow.

Getting a flu shot seems so routine now -- a lot of the time I'm thinking about my next chore, rather than the needle that's being inserted in my arm.  The pain is minimal, of course.  I'd far rather receive a routine inoculation in my arm than a shot of novocaine in my gum from my friendly dentist. 

And yet facing similar shots was so traumatic in my childhood.  And we seemed to receive them so frequently.  Our school teacher would drop the bombshell on us -- at such and such time, we would be lining up and filing down to the nurse's office where we would be receiving shots of one kind or another.  She might as well have announced that the boxcars bound for Auschwitz were awaiting us. Terror swept the classroom.  The faces of half the class would be ashen.  Boys would begin nervously giggling and warning each other of the humongous size of the needles with which we were to be jabbed.  By the time we had reached the nurse's office and were lined up for our shots, a few kids would be crying -- their cries adding to the rapidly increasing stress and horror all the rest of us felt.

I hardly remember the actual pain of those many shots I received in childhood -- only the stress and fear experienced in the hours and minutes preceding them.  If smarter, I would have seen in this fact an allegory for much of life itself.