There are plenty of arguments surrounding both sides of the great flu-shot debate. So I ask: Should I get one? Or should I not?

I have to consider that lots of folks ask good, pointed questions about the process, such as, “why would I want to put toxic chemicals and virus strains grown on living tissue into my body?”

That’s really not a bad thing to ponder, is it?

But here’s the deal: even though I have a passing familiarity with the issues, and I certainly like to avoid putting terribly nasty things into my physical self whenever possible, I’ve had a flu shot every year since 1990 and I really haven’t regretted it. I’m under the impression that they work for me, and I suppose that’s about as important as anything.

In the winter of 1989-90 I was living in Corvallis and working in Monmouth. The season went along fairly normally until, finally, in February, I got a really bad case of the flu for the second year in a row. I thought I was gonna die! That summer I moved to Bloomington, Indiana, where the upcoming winter was certainly going to be more challenging for me (than any Oregon winter had been for twenty years). I got a flu shot that fall at the Indiana University Health Center, and I’ve followed through with a shot every year since then.

Even when it’s been difficult…remember the vaccine shortage of a couple of years ago? I thought, in 2004, that I may have to forgo the usual flu-shot ritual. However it happened, the shortage started to ease up a bit, though, and some of us “at-risk” (read “older”) folks finally, in late December, were able to get in for our shots. I remember standing in line at the GetAFluShot.com location on 102nd Avenue in SE Portland, thinking “who are all these old people?” And, “why do I belong to this group?”

At any rate, I ended up getting a flu shot, even in that problematic year.

These past few weeks I went through the usual, yearly, mild debate I have with myself about getting the shot…and then, today, I went in to do it. The thing is, ever since I’ve started getting a flu shot, I have not had a case of the flu that even comes close to the cases I had the last two years when I had no flu shot.

Maybe, at this point, it borders on superstition. Still…