Brain surgery, it wasn’t.

In the end, the procedure took just a few seconds. And to the delight of my teen, the whole episode involved nothing sharp.

I gave my daughter her flu shot in our living room — only it wasn’t a shot. It was FluMist, newly available for home use.

FluMist is nothing new. It was federally approved in 2003, and this year’s version is the same strain as the traditional influenza vaccine shot. Except this one involves a little pump designed to shoot a cloud of tiny droplets up your nose. Maryland is one of 34 states where it’s permitted for home use.

Getting Matilda the flu vaccine this year made a lot of sense because the number of cases last season was the highest in years and particularly awful for children. About 50 kids die in a normal flu year, but 280 died last season, the most since 2009.

Hundreds of thousands of kids and adults are also hospitalized in any given year with flu. That doesn’t include the millions more who spend an achy and stuffed-up week fighting the chills on the sofa.

For my daughter, catching the virus would mean missing school, and maybe equally importantly to her, her games.

Finding new ways to get vaccines in the hands of people has some urgency. The number of people getting the flu vaccine has been declining, with fewer than half of kids getting inoculated last year. While his administration has criticized some past vaccine practices, President Donald Trump’s federal vaccine advisory panel continues to recommend everyone 6 months and older get this one.

Matilda was immediately interested when I asked if she wanted the mist over the shot. Her expression turned a bit more stone-faced after I asked if she was interested in my shooting the mist up her nose.

But she didn’t say no.

So I went onto the FluMist site and filled out the health questionnaire, which was pretty quickly reviewed by their medical provider and approved by our health insurance. FluMist is generally available to those between ages 2 to 49 who don’t have certain conditions, including, for example, an egg allergy.

I paid about $8 dollars for shipping and scheduled the delivery for a day when I could be home.

After a flurry of text messages tracking its whereabouts, the package arrived on the appointed day in a box the size of a microwave. Inside was a thick plastic foam container with six big cooler packs, instructions and the vaccine sprayer, as well as a return envelope for disposal after its use.

I downloaded an app to scan the delivery to ensure that the temperature had stayed cool enough for the vaccine’s appropriate use. The sprayer itself was barely bigger than a Q-tip and was filled with two doses, one for each nostril.

Elizabeth Bodin, an AstraZeneca vice president in charge of vaccines and immune therapies, said there was “strong interest” in her company’s at-home vaccine, though she did not provide specific numbers about how many people besides me put in an order.

The company’s goal, she said, was to make vaccination more convenient. And if it works as intended, that would increase the number with some protection from preventable illness and also reduce overcrowding from sick people at doctors’ offices and hospitals.

We’re all now part of a generation of consumers accustomed to ordering everything from T-shirts to lunch. So would vaccine delivery also make sense?

It certainly doesn’t cut out the pharmacy completely. You still need them for other vaccines. Plus, not everyone will want to do this themselves.

How was my experience as a first-time vaccine administrator?

I was not as confident shoving the tip of the sprayer and plunging vaccine in the first nostril as I was with the second, so the doses may have been a bit uneven. My 13-year-old declared the feeling a little “weird.”

It was helpful that we could stick the vaccine in our refrigerator until we were ready. The FluMist people certainly didn’t let me forget it was there, nagging us a bit via text during our lollygagging.

Bodin claimed that the company had a perfect record with 100% of people they used to test the mist successfully able to administer it. No issues with misting in the wild yet either, she said.

But let’s be honest, it’s not exactly scrubbing in for surgery. That said, I did wash my hands.