Flu Vaccine: Do it or not?

[Jacob(smooth)]

The simple test is this. Someone drops £100 on the pavement outside your house. If you'd go Fetch it, it's a cold. If you couldn't it's the flu.

Yes! This is how someone at my work put it, and I couldn't agree more! I got flu right after my Grandmother died, and the effort it took to go to her funeral was ridiculous. It nearly killed me, I was sat there in the crematorium when I got a nosebleed just from the physical stress of walking around. Then I picked up some other bug that made me throw up, too. I remember later that night I suddenly needed to puke and ran to the toilet, my worried sister right behind me to check I was ok, and as I puked, blood squirted out of my nose like nothing I'd ever seen before. My sister reckons the blood hit the toilet bowl before my vomit did.
So I ended up coughing, sneezing, bleeding, vomiting, headachey, in pain all over, and then got all this icky fliud on ny lungs to add to it. I thought I was dying and kept ringing NHS Direct for advice on whether or not to go to hospital. One night my breathing was so bad I got my sister to stay with me and make sure I didn't stop altogether. So yeah, when people say they have flu when they clearly have a cold, it pisses me off somewhat.

But still, the thought of going through all that again scares me less than the thought of getting stabbed with a needle for some unknown, totally illogical reason.

It's not unknown at all. It's the abstract risk of flu against the immediate reality of an injection. Allowing someone to stick a needle in you is counterintuitive, no matter how much your rational conscious brain tells you it's a good idea, your irrational subconscious tells you it's a really bad idea.

Needle phobias are both very common and very real.

We're not always the logical rational creatures we like to think we are.