After a 2 year hia­tus from col­lege, I will be return­ing next month to con­tinue my stud­ies, tak­ing night courses to increase my cred­its and push my way towards grad­u­at­ing with my bach­e­lors degree in Visual Com­mu­ni­ca­tion. It’s been both a per­sonal goal of mine and some­thing my fam­ily sup­ports to the upteenth per­cent. How­ever, the process towards con­tin­u­ing my edu­ca­tion has been inter­est­ing to say the least.

First and fore­most, all col­leges require that your immu­ni­ties be up to date. It’s obvi­ous why this is impor­tant due to the fact that hun­dreds upon thou­sands of stu­dents cross paths through­out the day. There­fore, there is always going to be a hand­ful of stu­dents with some form of a sick­ness. To pre­vent a mass out­break of rubella stu­dents are required to have their immunities.

The Doc­tor informed me that they could check for immu­ni­ties by exam­in­ing my blood. Last week I walked into the “blood lab”, slumped my arm for­ward and cringed in fear because I hate nee­dles. I informed the tech­ni­cian that I would be look­ing the other direc­tion because it was my pref­er­ence that I didn’t see the blood. At this point she lit­er­ally jabbed the nee­dle into the side of my arm. As I’ve described to friends and fam­ily it felt like some­one had inserted the tip of steak knife into my skin. At that point my reflex to strike sub­sided because it’s against the law to smack around your med­ical support.

Yes­ter­day I received word from the Doctor’s office that I needed booster shots. Accord­ing to them, I was not immune to the measles or tuber­cu­lo­sis and the result of this is that I would need to get shots to bring my immu­niza­tions up to date. To recap, I’ve been stabbed in the arm for blood­work and now I need some­one to jam a nee­dle, three or four times in my body, to bring me “up to code”. All this to sim­ply con­tinue my edu­ca­tion? I cer­tainly hope it’s worth the trouble.