Seeing Your Doctor for Prevention,
Treating On Your Own: A Report from the Field

First off, let me be clear: what I report below I am not recommending. My first obligation is to my readers. Also, I am grateful to Brooke Binkowski, a stellar journalist-friend, who spontaneously emailed me this story this morning. It arrived in my inbox amid a heated social-media discussion about who the real villains are in the failure to vaccinate. Also, why is it we can’t reach them. Are they the rich and entitled, the libertarians, the natural, organic folk, or who?

Sometimes, you hear a story and it makes you want to use it while it’s hot. This is a gem of a story, but it’s not really about vaccines very much. If you like it, you might want to follow Brooke at @brooklynmarie. She has a lot of great stories up her sleeve.

Here’s what Brooke wrote:

Because of who I am and where I live, I collect old hippies, you know, I feed them, talk to them, hang out with them… one of them stopped by yesterday, he’s about 70, an ex-drug runner, never has taken care of his health, has diabetes, and has had major heart surgery last year (I went to see him in the hospital.)

Anyway I said: “How have you been? He said, “Oh, I’ve been fine. I ran into complications recently, did something to my pinky toe, so I cut it off.” I said, “I’m sorry – you had it cut off?” He said “No, I cut it off myself, just nipped it off with a pair of pliers, wanna see?” (of course I did, I am one of those people)

So he’s showing it to me, it’s healing nicely, etc, and I say to him, well what happened? He said: “I’m diabetic, it was getting gangrenous, just wasn’t feeling it, so… also I decided to go off my heart meds, they were making me feel like crap.” So this guy, the ex-drug runner who cuts off his own toes and now lives out in a boat on the marina. He has a daughter. Guess what?  He got her vaccinated.