#hand-foot-mouth was the worst illness I've had in probably a decade

[astraldepths]

so if you're a tiny brand-new child, your immune system is just the worst, and ideally you should be exposed to both a lot of people and a lot of vaccines, so that you can learn how to fight both people and illnesses, and become a person who doesn't get deathly ill the second you get sneezed on

at the very least, you should have one of those things - either people or vaccines, so that you have a fighting chance of not being a creature that people in old books might refer to as "sickly" or "of faint constitution"

the problem is if you had a parent who, due to extreme conservative ideology, worked to prevent you from being around both people and vaccines, your immune system will basically not exist until you're old enough to lie to doctors and tell them it's cool if they give you shots to hopefully extend your lifespan, but depending on how obsessive and protective your parent is about monitoring your doctor's appts, that might take a fucking while

anyway, what I've discovered (after catching hand-foot-mouth at the age of 28), is that now that I'm actually around both people and vaccines, my immune system is finally doing the thing where I'm not getting sick every month and a half! and because I'm working at a job with small children, I'm finally getting immunity to all of these illnesses I should have been immune to twenty-three years ago!

funny how that happens