As I was recently writing up a section in the website about immunizations I realized I had totally spaced getting it done for myself. Many of us from SherpaTrek are embarking on a Himalayan trek for the month of October, and it is now officially time to stop daydreaming about it. I’ve done a lot of reading about keeping healthy for the trip to Nepal, but to my great fortune I have a cousin who is a well-informed nurse (which means she didn’t get her information from just surfing web pages). She quickly rattled off a list of vital immunizations for the trip, and asked to see my shot records. I felt a dread coming on because there’s no way I could get any proof together of my last big immunization binge as I was about to travel to South Korea several years previous. At that time I got my shot record back with extensive scribbles and rubber stamped splotches enough to cover me for many years to come. But now without proof I might have to redo the full series, including my favorite, the cold peanut butter shot in the rear end (a.k.a. gamma globulin).

I visited the County Health Office here and asked there about what I really needed for traveling through Southeast Asia. Once again, the long prattle: Typhoid, tetanus, meningitis, hepatitis A thru Z, Japanese encephalitis, and Malaria. I’ll admit it was enticing to imagine all of those bugs floating in my system all at once, but I explained about the immunizations I had received just a few years previous. Ultimately I realized I needed to obtain those shot records to be entirely certain. I opted to receive a cocktail of diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis (DTaP), as well as the oral typhoid. The benefit of oral typhoid is that it will last 5 years rather than only 2, and it was cheaper. I was just in time to have that option because the treatment of 4 pills (one every two days) has to be completed by at least one week before departure. Now it’s time for me to rummage through my old boxes.