Slaying Dragons

Last week my kid had a check-up with the pediatrician which resulted in a flu shot. My six-year-old calmly sat flipping through a book while the doctor and I discussed the matter. Too calm, I thought, which I figured was due to a malfunction in the universal translator. When the doc went out to get the nurse with the pointy needles, I explained that the words "vaccination" and "injection" in this case were synonymous with "shot" and received more the sort of reaction I had been expecting. Hysterics.

I explained what the flu was and how it wasn't much fun and how a shot was far quicker and less painful. No self-respecting six-year-old believes this. He was fully ready to barf for days in exchange for no needles, and to swear that this is preferable in front of a court of law if necessary.

We got through the appointment as expected, with tears, screaming, and a certain amount of man-handling, followed by cartoons, a grilled cheese sandwich, and many woeful exclamations over a band-aid the size of a penny.

Parenthood is glorious gig.

I was still in the proverbial dog house until I explained about the dragons.

Normally I don't go in for allegorizing this kind of stuff with my kid. Straight up science is cool enough and it's my experience that kids prefer that you don't talk down to them anyway. But my explanation about antibodies wasn't inspiring awe and interest, so a mom does what she must.

"Well, you see, it's like bit in The Hobbit about the dragon..."

Notice to my intrepid readers: what follows includes a spoiler if you have not yet read The Hobbit, by J.R. Tolkien, which, incidentally, I recommend. Ye have been warned.

"So remember how they fought the dragon?"

"They shot it with an arrow."

Archers and dragons are more interesting; I had his attention now. "Right, but they had to know just where to hit him, right?"

"Right, because there was a hole on the armor on his tummy."

Luke is bouncing around now and demonstrating arrows flying through the air with sound effects and explosions, and reenacting the fall of Smaug with dramatic emphasis.

"It's a shame they didn't know about that hole right off the bat, isn't it?" I said, nonchalantly. "Suppose I had walked in there two weeks before that whole battle and set a dead dragon just like that Smaug down in front of the archers so they could check it out and find the weak spot? Then when Smaug showed up-"

"They would have shot him!" [Insert increasingly dramatic replays of the demise of Smaug and his fall from the sky here.]

"Right. It would have saved them a lot of trouble. They could have wiped him out before he burned most the town into a crisp. So when we got the flu shot last week, what the nurse gave your body was like a tiny dead dragon."

The kid stopped short.

"And right now, your body is poking around it looking for that weak spot. Then it's going to make loads of little tiny soldiers that know just how to take out a flu dragon that looks like that if it ever shows up."

"Lots of soldiers? Like an army?"

God bless J. R. Tolkien.

"Like an army."

And then the kid started his dance around again with the sound effects, explosions, and mock-fighting, leading an army of men against a dragon, that truthfully, those dwarves probably shouldn't have pissed off in the first place, but hey, who am I to argue?

I'm not saying that he's going to willingly sign up for flu shot next year, but we had a moment, and as parent, these kinds of moments don't show up everyday. The little bandaid became a battle scar, and while I'm still not a hero for a dragging him into doctor's office, I think that his sword will stop glowing blue everytime I walk into the room, for now. Particularly if I continue to agree to play the part of Smaug in the theatrical recreations he stages in the living room.

Incidentally, if you haven't had your flu shot yet, there's still time. Flu.gov has a flu vaccine finder. You too can have a bandaid and an army of tiny soldiers ready to slay dragons for you.