Here is a fun conversation starter for mixed-age groups: “Tell me how old you are without specifically telling me your age.”
On that theme, here is a fun fact about me that puts me in a very small category of American adults (about 5%, according to the quick google search I just did):
I have never had chickenpox!
I was vaccinated against it in 1995, the same year that it was approved.
When I was growing up, we would road trip up north every summer to see my (great-great) Aunt Winifred, whose house was right on the beach. I’d collect sand dollars and place them around the bird bath, then go upstairs to the long room filled with toys and with light from the window that spanned the entire beach-facing side of the house. Aunt Winifred, who was my grandmother’s aunt (although they were pretty close in age) walked with a limp. One of her legs was shorter than the other because she had had polio as a child.
Even though I remember those summers so vividly, and the toys, and the squeaky dumbwaiter by the stairs, even though I was raised by my grandparents and have a history degree, even though I understand that, in the grand scheme of things, Winifred’s childhood polio didn’t happen THAT long ago, the very concept of diseases like polio and measles and chickenpox have always felt like something that existed in the murky depths of the past. They were like dysentery and diphtheria and smallpox and cholera and all those other things that usually killed you before you could finish playing Oregon Trail (I’m dating myself again, but Oregon Trail was a very popular–and, in retrospect, very pixelated–computer game that everyone played in the 90s).
I like to think that in an alternate universe, there is a version of me with a closet full of skirt suits and a drawer full of laser pointers who gives lectures on the Black Death and goes on summer research trips to the CDC archives and the Alaskan permafrost to write about the 1918 flu and its legacy. It should come as a surprise to no one that my morbid little heart has always been fascinated by the history of disease. This interest had the unfortunate side effect of filling my brain with fear and dread and worst case scenarios when we first started reading about the spread of a new disease across the oceans at the end of 2019, but if you’re ever bored, I can still regale you with fun facts and book recommendations.
I’ve lived through some notable events (like the end of the Berlin Wall) and cultural shifts (the advent of instantly available internet access), but the ways that the landscape of disease and the advances of modern medicine have changed from Aunt Winifred’s childhood to mine never cease to astound me. I’m not a scientist (although I also like to think that in an alternate universe, I have a closet full of lab coats and practical shoes and spend my days researching the chemical properties of poisons and venoms), but I am constantly amazed by the advancements that humans have been able to make. Sure, I personally happen to think that penicillin is overrated, probably because I happen to be allergic to it, but the very fact that antibiotics exist today is incredible, especially considering that we were still arguing about the concept of germ theory 150 years ago.
Anyway, before I went on an extended tangent about how cool science is and how interesting the history of epidemiology is, I had sat down to let you all know that I’m now fully vaccinated against COVID-19. I very carefully selected Moana from a box of Disney princess band-aids for the first shot and Captain America from a box of Marvel superhero band-aids for the second (Captain America was born in either 1917 or 1918, depending on which timeline of the comics one reads, so I like to think that he would be every bit as amazed by modern medicine and vaccines as I am). I had a pretty bad time with the second shot, but that made me no less relieved to have received it.
I don’t think there’s a vaccination for tangents, though I guess you may have come to expect them from me at this point, especially if you tune in to my Bible study live streams.