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Despite the fact that temperatures here in the Valley of the Sun (or as my brother likes to call it The Actual Sun) continue to hover around 100 degrees, it's technically fall, which means that flu season is upon us.

I don't think I ever got a flu shot prior to getting diabetes. I was healthy for the most part and likely didn't understand what the flu really is. And even four years into the disease, last fall was the first time I got the shot since being diagnosed.

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It's about once a week now that my college sends out an important "Flu" reminder. Wash your hands, stay at home if you experience symptoms, and seek treatment immediately for the more severe. We've had several reports of swine flu, including some students in my friends' classes. And more and more of my friends are coming down with colds and "flu-like symptoms."

For me, every reminder and every swine flu diagnosis sends a tiny shock-wave through my system. I know that my immune system isn't that of a healthy, non-diabetic. It has its weak spots, its vulnerabilities. Especially lately with all these highs and crazy numbers.

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Ring around a rosy, a pocket full of posies...

By the time we reach adulthood, most of us know that the seemingly-nonsensical nursery rhymes of youth were sharp political snipes and sarcastic observations at the time of their composition. We know, for example, that the "ring" or "rosy" was the distinct buboe of bubonic plague, that it was believed that carrying around fresh flowers would help ward off the Plague, that the belongings of a Plague victim would be burned to try to limit the spread of the disease, and that all too many people had succumbed -- and would succumb -- to its horrors.

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"If he has trouble breathing, bring him in immediately," the nurse practitioner said earlier today. Or was it yesterday? I’m so tired. I’m typing in the dark, watching Charlie sleep. Listening to his breathing. It’s 3:56 am.

I’m fully dressed in middle of the night emergency attire. Yankees baseball cap to cover bed head and big bags under my eyes. Wrinkled first-I-could-find shirt probably on backwards. I’m writing to stay awake. 30 minutes ago I carried Charlie’s burning body downstairs and got ready to take him to the ER. He was glassy-eyed with a very high fever and coughed a horribly painful cough when he tried to speak. We looked at each other nervously.

We were doing our rounds, Susanne and I, shooting grape-flavored Motrin into the mouths of our two other kids.

Three kids with the swine flu.

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I don't believe in vaccines. Perhaps it was the family that I grew up in. Or the disease that I've lived with every day since a series of regular, routine vaccines when I was 4 years old. Maybe it's just my own understanding of health and traditional thinking.

But I don't believe in them. However controversial that might be and however many of you might hate/ban/harass me for it, I cannot bring myself to believe in them. And trust me, I have done my research.

When I was 4 years old, my mother took me in for all the regular vaccines. The most memorable for both of us is the MMR because it has since been linked to autoimmune diseases such as type 1 diabetes. Almost immediately, my mom noticed a change in me. I was sick, unlike myself, and in ill health.

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