Fear and vaccinations

"We will end up boarding our flights
barefoot, barehanded and buck naked
except for a hospital gown
they'll make us put on at the airport."
-- Eugene Robinson, columnist
Washington Post, Aug. 11

That, I expect at this point. But little did I know that we would go through something similar to get the green-light from our doctors.

We leave for Morocco in just about one month. So we called Kaiser's international travel clinic to see what, if anything, we would be wise to do before leaving. Turns out the more appropriate question would have been, "What, dear needle-weilding clinician, must you do to me before I go."

After running through a 20-minute phone conversation about any place we'll be sleeping, our dietary habits, medical histories and so on, they worked up a three-page list of recommendations.

Now, really, it's not that I'm ungrateful. And perhaps my views on all this are more colored by the fact I've never done much international travel. But part of me wonders what we Americans -- with our cushy lives, our nothing-is-safe political climate, our genetically engineered food and our general science-as-cure-all culture -- have gotten our bodies and brains into.

Before people from other countries come to visit the States, do their doctors run them through hoops like this? Or is it just when Americans venture beyond their borders that it's like a panic-stricken Desmond fearfully stepping through the hatch door marked QUARANTINE on "Lost"?

To take it a step further, does a litany of shots such as this, which we both got this morning -- Hepatitis A; measles, mumps, rubella; polio; tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis -- contribute in any small way to increasing isolationism?

If so, and I fear it might, I think that's tremendously sad.

Of course, this is predicated on the aforementioned cushy American life, which affords us the means to do a little exploring. And I understand that some folks either aren't able or interested in traveling much. But there are others who might say the poking and prodding just isn't worth the trouble. And there are still others who might see it like going into some wild, unsafe, unimaginable netherworld.

That I don't understand.

It's only by getting out of our comfort zones, by seeing new people and places and cultures, that we'll really get to better understand the world and what -- no matter what we hear or read or take on faith -- is our very little place in it.

So with that in mind, later today I'll dutifully go pick up our travel meds -- the ciprofloxacin, the ioperamide, the oral rehydration salts and the vivotif berna -- whatever all that is, and we'll be one step further down the path of this adventure.

One that, despite any gastrointestinal or more severe inconveniences, will be worth every moment and penny of it when we're sleeping under the stars in the desert, or playing the drums in the casbah, or sharing a meal in the home of a friend's family high in the Rif Mountains and a world away from all we once knew.