Today Boston University and the nation-state triumphed over my one-woman crusade to fight the system that mandates superfluous inoculations.

Earlier this year, the Mini-Empire took away my right to check out books for six months, as I am supposed to be allowed to do as a doctoral student.  This irked me, but I decided I would just would carry books back and forth, renewing them every 28 days, if it meant that unnecessary anti-bodies would be kept out of my system.  Last week, though, my six-month privileges returned as mysteriously as they had gone away.  I smiled a smug little smile, thinking I had beaten the powers once again.

Foolish girl.

Last week, I got a letter from student health services saying that if I didn’t get the Hep B vaccine, a tetanus shot (despite the fact that I’ve had two of these in the last ten years) and the meningitis vaccine, I would no longer be a student at Boston University at all.  I wouldn’t be able to check out any books, for any length of time.

These people really know how to hit you where it hurts. 

So I grumpily called student health services to make sure I didn’t need anything else.  The nice man there again tried to convince me that I should get the HPV vaccine, despite the fact that they don’t give it to you after you turn 26.  As I did in 2004.  the nice man and I did our linguistic dance around logic. Once. Again.

“But you started here before you were 26.  Don’t you see?”

“I agree that is true.  But as I am now not, in fact, 26, and would be getting the vaccine now and not, in fact, in 2003 when I started my second degree, it is all really a moot point, isn’t it?”

The man hung up.

However, the phone conversation did lead me to uncover an important revelation--I do not have to have the meningitis vaccine.  It is only strongly recommended.  So strongly, in fact, that you can only get out of it if you ask again and again why you must have it if you don’t live on campus, until they grudgingly admit that you can come in and fill out a secret waiver form that is kept in a dark room locked in a bomb shelter beneath the city.  I was thrilled to learn this and am currently gathering provisions for the three day trek to petition the hermit who keeps the forms for sweet release from this obligation.

And yes, it does occur to me there is the freak chance I could contract meningitis.  But mark my words--if I expire while the virus is in my system, it will not be because of the disease.  I will have dropped dead from the irony of it all.

And I want that engraved on my tombstone too, thank you very much.