Vaccines and me (and you?)

redbird had a post about looking up her history of childhood vaccines. I don't have any documentation, but I have memories. I'm reposting my comment (slightly edited) for archival purposes, and am happy to have other people post about their experiences/memories/whatever here.

I was born toward the end of the baby boom (1956). I am just old enough that the MMR wasn't available when I was a child, though it must have been right on the edge, since I believe my youngest brother (born in 1960) was able to take advantage of it. I had a nasty case of measles, and I also had mumps and chicken pox. My mother sent me to stay with a friend who had rubella, but I didn't come down with it. In college, I had a rubella titer drawn -- apparently the vaccine was scarce enough that they only wanted to use it on people who really needed it, and it was easy to have a subclinical case -- and the result came back as ambiguous, so I didn't get it.

I had all the other standard childhood vaccines, including smallpox (I have the scar), DTP, and polio. There were a couple of rounds of the oral vaccine (in a sugar syrup), and then the injections later, which I was rather indignant about. It occurs to me that the polio vaccine in sugar must have been part of a community program, because we went to a church and stood in line to get it instead of the usual doctor's office visit.

When I went to Kenya a few years ago, I had to have yellow fever vaccine, and the travel clinic ended up giving me a bunch of others: polio (again), rubella, and Hepatitis C are the ones I remember for sure, plus oral typhoid and malaria prophylaxis.

I had the shingles vaccine (both of them) recently. No one said anything to me about scarcity, and I'm heard enough about shingles that I'm happy to up my chances of avoiding it.

I've asked about a TB vaccine, because I was apparently exposed to it sometime during nursing school, and started reacting positively to standard TB tests at that point. I had to take a year's worth of prophylactic (isoniazad, IIRC), and when I was working as a nurse, had to have periodic chest x-rays to prove I didn't have TB. But apparently there isn't anything generally available.

I make sure to keep my tetanus booster up to date, because I engage in high-risk activity for that particular disease -- I work with raw sheep fleece in the presence of pointy objects. Everything else I'm a lot more casual about.