@MMarciano,
On tetanus shots, I'll go with Marco.
As a bacti major, I learned it was seven years. Later I learned fourteen was ok (but don't tell the patients). Better safe than sorry, in any case
Me, I hadn't had one in a couple of decades and got one again recently. Three shots that day, flu, pneumo, tet. The tet was the one that was mildly aggravating.
On shots - my cousin had a lot of shots as a toddler and has been life long freaked.
I didn't, though I had a few, including a memorable incredibleoma of a penicillin shot with the one ear ache of my life. I didn't know how to swear back then so I screamed.
I was interested in medicine as I aged, and so I figured that I needed to be brave.
Anyway, I later used to train people to take blood by using my veins. Not a classroom full of people, just those learning in our research lab, but quite a a few, as I need blood to do ANA smears.
Soon I worried about being caught with vein use when entering a foreign (sic) country. I always wore long tee shirts, etc., on airplanes. Not that my veins looked like junkie's - but could be a cause for alarm.
I get needle fear, but don't have it myself. What I remember is patient fear, that is mine.
I once was sent to take blood samples from an old aged home, as they called them then, and had a million year old woman scream at me.. anyway, I took an aliquot of her blood, but I nearly crumped doing it.
Alternately, I was once sent up in the hollywood hills to a bed with an adolescent with probable mono. This involved from me a mix of assertiveness and kindness, though the kindness was dissipating. It worked out.
I'm also famous to myself for pushing my way into a patient's room and taking a sample, finding out later what I knew but tossed off, that she was a mucky mucky. Turned out to be a big donor to the clinic. I had my rounds.
Now I might look at that less benignly, or maybe not.
