Scalpel, Jeri. I had two smallpox vaccinations: one in 1960, so I could start school, and the next in 1974, when I joined the regular force.

I never had MMR because I had all those diseases, plus chicken pox, before the inoculations were invented. Polio was the injectable — Salk, I think — version, not droplets on a sugar cube, and we got boosters every year at school. Typhus, typhoid types A & B, tetanus and diphtheria was a single big fat (probably 10-cc) syringe with pink stuff in it, and we got boosters of that, too.

The tuberculosis test was also done at school every year, with a machine that made a noise like a stapler as the technician pressed its business end on our wrists so it could inject a tiny dose of reagent under the outermost layer of skin. In the forces, for some strange reason, we did the TB test the old-fashioned way, with a small syringe and a fine needle slipped between the layers of skin. I never saw a kid faint at a school needle parade, but one or two went down every week during basic — always at either the blood sample station or the TB test. It was seeing the needle pierce the skin that did it.

In the service, I was inoculated against several tropical diseases, too. The yellow fever shot stung something wicked and the cholera shot made me a little feverish, but nothing more.