It doesn’t hurt, we promise

Flu season is coming, and with it comes Columbia’s infamous free flu shot fairs. (Note: if you are a Barnard student, don’t go to the Columbia one – they won’t take you.) This year, Bwog decided that the best way to convince the Columbia community at large to make sure to get properly inoculated was to share some horror stories of our own. Get a flu shot, or face ending up in primary healthcare services… or worse.

• I never got the flu shot growing up because I lived in warm places my whole life. I made it one winter here unscratched, but my sophomore year I got so sick I couldn’t do anything except watch family feud in bed for a week. My nose would not stop bleeding. Once at 3am, I went to get a towel for my nose that had started bleeding in my sleep and fainted in the hallway of my suite. It sucked. Probably won’t get a flu shot this semester though.
• I was really sick one weekend, but I had a lot of big events planned: like going to a Control Top performance, and attending a punk show in a basement in Bushwick. All the activity proved too much for me and I wound up at primary health on Monday, where they told me they couldn’t do anything, and if I had the flu it was too late. A couple weeks later I still had a hacking cough, so I returned to primary health where they nebulized me and prescribed me an inhaler that I use to this day. I can no longer blow up balloons. My lungs are fucked.
• I got the flu shot my sophomore year and within a week I was horribly sick, and I think I lost like five lbs (god bless), and then my boyfriend dumped me and it was a bad time all around.
• I usually got flu shots because at my high school if your parents signed a form for it and you didn’t get the shot the health center tracked you down until you got the shot, so last year I didn’t get the shot as a sort of rebellion for that – and guess what I got a HORRIBLE flu. It was so bad that I could barely walk from Carman to Lerner, and walking to John Jay Health Services from Carman like almost killed me. i was in so much pain for like a week, and lost my voice for like three weeks or something.
• I’ve never gotten a flu shot and I’m usually fine, but I also inevitably get at least one bad cold each fall – runny nose, exhaustive coughing every night, the works. Maybe what I think is a bad cold is actually the flu and I just push through it?
• I got it every year except last year because I forgot and I got sick so much… but that was mostly strep, so doesn’t have much to do with the flu shot. But I think everyone should get it every year. Please help the people around you. (I’m a hypocrite because of last year, but now I’m a changed woman and will definitely get it.)
• Didn’t get a flu shot because I had pneumonia all of freshman year and the fucking health center didn’t diagnose it even though I went there like 5 times. Sorry to all the boys I probably gave pneumonia. And girls.