At the time in which this blog posts I should be about 10-15 hours into my 40-ish hours worth of travel to Indonesia. No, you didn’t read that wrong, it’s going to take me around 40 hours between flights & layovers to get to Indonesia. However, my flight & travel time is not the point of this here blog, the point of this here blog is meant as a discussion for other aspects of the pre-trip, immunizations.
If you’ve been following the chronicles of my last few weeks & the rush order of vaccinations I’ve had to burn through you may be slightly caught up, though I think I’ll end up going in further detail here than I did on my Instagram/Facebook stories or Twitter, naturally.
I woke up one morning around two & a half weeks ago with the peculiar thought, ‘huh, I wonder if I need certain immunizations for my upcoming trip to Indonesia.’ That out of the blue epiphany would turn out to be correct, I needed a butt load of them.
I immediately hopped out of bed & onto my laptop where I sent the trip leader a ‘hey, sooooo vaccines?’ email to which they responded with a CDC link, a WHO link, & an explanation that most of the other people going to Indonesia had already received the vaccinations required seeing as they had just gone to Tanzania at the beginning of the summer. I got to work at once.
The list is a doozy folks, I’m going to share it below & then as the story of this saga progresses we’ll go through them a little more in depth.
Charlie’s Vaccine List For Indonesia:
-Yellow Fever
-Japanese Encephalitis
-COVID-19
-Influenza
-Rabies
-Polio
-TDAP (Tetanis, Diphtheria, Pertussis)
-MMR (Measles, Mumps, Rubella)
-Chicken Pox
-Shingles
-Pneumonia
-Meningitis
-Hepatitis A&B
-Typhoid
-In Addition To Melaria Pills
A lot right? A pretty daunting list & even if you have previously had a lot of these they recommend getting boosters for them. Now, all of that list out of the way, let’s get into the saga…
The vaccine that kicks us off is COVID-19. I was due for the new booster & already had an appointment booked at this point. Additionally, when I went to book the other myriad of vaccinations listed above it asked me to consult my pharmacist about booking more than one vaccine at a time, so that’s exactly what I did. I talked it over with the pharmacist who explained the following to me: one, they would need to order a lot of the vaccines in question due to their “exotic” nature & the fact they weren’t widely given in the US. They recommended I contact the “Travel Center” Walgreens in Green Hills to see which of them they had in stock & which they needed to order. Two, they recommended getting no more than 2-4 at a time, really leaning more into the lower end of that range. So COVID shot acquired & vax card up to date, I had a call to make.
My call with the pharmacist at the Walgreens “travel center” was, dare I say, a tad hectic. The pharmacist was a tad overwhelmed with the vaccination list I’d given her but was more than willing to order them all & help me to get as many of them as possible before my trip. Here we ran into our first hurtle & it was something that I kick myself for not remembering.
A certain number of my list of vaccines were live vaccines. Live vaccines cannot be administered within a two week window of other vaccines, at least that’s how it was explained to me, so things like MMR, Yellow Fever, Typhoid, & a few others were out of the question.
Following my call with the pharmacist I gave my parents a rang. My parents work in hospice & my mother specifically has been a nurse her whole life & therefore has medical insight. Fortunately when I called they also happened to have a pharmacist in the car with them as well.
I was given over to their pharmacist who went through the list with me over the phone once again. He however had some opinions about which of them I should make a top priority & which I should either ignore or move farther down the list.
Naturally anything I received as an immunization when I was younger was on that list so off went Chicken Pox, MMR, Meningitis, Polio, Etc. Furthermore he recommended that I don’t put too much stock in the shingles vax or the pneumonia vax as they’re primarily recommended for people over the age of 65.
With my newly updated list of jabs I returned that evening to start crossing them off the list receiving the influenza jab as well as the TDAP booster, neither of which did me much harm or gave me many side effects.
Following the weekend I made my way to the Travel Center where my other vaccines were waiting. The pharmacist there was a different one than the one I’d talked to previously but he recommended that I waited until Thursday to get the shots since I’d gotten three on Friday & that while he was more than willing to give them all at once, he was a little less than comfortable doing so. Additionally, when he’d gone to ring up my vaccinations through my insurance they had decided they weren’t going to cover them. He then recommended I make an appointment with my primary to try to receive prior authorization & bypass the insurance paywall.
I partially heeded his shot warning & ended up with the combo Hep A & B vaccine before calling up my doctor who managed to squeeze me in at noon the next day.
Once again feeling no side effects from the vaccine I made my way to my primary care doctor to attain a script for the vaccines along with prior authorization & a script for malaria pills.
The malaria pills were covered, but no matter how hard we pushed or what work arounds we tried insurance still didn’t want to cover the Rabies vax & the Japanese Encephalitis one, you know, the two highly deadly diseases. So out of pocket they became. Shoutout to Cigna on that one.
I managed to finally get the injections for the both of the above on Thursday along with my malaria prevention pills…there were side effects for both of those, in fact they both knocked me out for the entirety of last weekend, hence why last week’s blog was delayed…apologies.
Needless to say this all was a lot & this is the abridged version of the story if you’d believe that. I’m grateful for all who helped me get the ones I got & for the ability to travel safely without the fear of catching life altering or potentially ending diseases. As for Yellow Fever & Typhoid, I wasn’t traveling from a place where Yellow Fever is prevalent & Typhoid is treatable with antibiotics if, God forbid, I were to contract it.
I’ll do my best to keep you updated on my travels over the next week or so but if you don’t hear from me until the week of the 12th know it’s because I’m in Indonesia. If you’d like to stay in the loop I do plan to post daily vlogs on both my Instagram & Tik Tok, I hope you’ll check them out!
As always, much love to you all,
See you on the other side!
-C