I am a young adult cancer patient who waited five and a half hours for the H1N1 vaccination along with 1200 other Chicagoans in a city college hallway. I do not have the trained eye of a public health analyst, yet it was easy to spy the glaring flaws that occurred in the whimsical distribution of this short supply vaccine. One of these oversights was the absence of trained workers screening citizens to determine if they actually needed a shot.

In the midst of what the government is calling a pandemic, there was a stunning lack of triage. Anyone could wait in line and receive a shot no questions asked. The public health department merely instructed citizens to use a common sense approach: If you consider yourself high-risk, get a vaccination.

I am an extremely aggressive patient with a high level of health literacy. As the author of a book on young adult cancer, I strongly advocate for patients participating in our care and knowing our bodies. However, I am not a doctor and medical practice is not common sense knowledge. Determinations of whether a patient’s underlying medical condition puts them at high-risk for complications from influenza should have been made by trained medical professionals, not by citizens making nebulous judgment calls.

Tensions ran high in the hallway of the makeshift walk-in clinic as my linemates and I vied for low cue numbers. People cut in front of each other, police mediated shouting matches, and camera crews interviewed desperate patients. My linemates and I began discussing our ailments, each defending our high-risk need for the shot. The 51-year-old man in front of me thought he was at risk due to high blood pressure that sometimes limits his use of over the counter medications. One woman in her late fifties boasted she thought she had a predisposition for bronchitis. Were these accurate self-determinations of the need for the vaccination or were my linemates pilfering from the short supply?