Second shot

Within the past hour, I received my second Pfizer Covid-19 vaccination.  

This is hardly major news, I realize.  It's happening all over America, all around the world.  But for some reason, this upcoming date has been a distraction for me all week.  I counted down the days, as I once might have counted down the days to a major school examination.  I was sent in a tailspin by our big snow storm over the weekend.

"Would the roads be open?  Could I drive?  Would I have to walk the three miles to the hospital in a raging blizzard?"  The answers were yes, yes, and no.  There's still a lot of snow out there, but not on the arterials.  The drive was a breeze.

(I have to say I admire the 90-year-old Seattle woman who walked three miles each way Sunday -- through a foot of snow -- to get her shot.  She did a practice walk two-thirds of the way to the hospital the day before, before the brunt of the snowfall had occurred -- just for practice.  Her daughter, back in Buffalo, New York, remarked, as quoted in the Seattle Times:

“We’re outside people,” she said. “We love being outside. I was out yesterday at Lake Ontario with a wind chill of 6 degrees.

“My mother isn’t going to let a little snow stop her from getting the vaccine,” she continued. “She was willing to walk however many miles there and back to get it. She is a really remarkable person who has the attitude of ‘You don’t let a little adversity get in your way.’

“She’s someone who looks for solutions, not problems.”

We're hardy Scandinavian folks here in Seattle -- plus a few who hail from Buffalo.  We don't let the weather keep us down.) 

No, my concern for today's date with the hospital went beyond the snow.  And I don't know why.  I'm not afraid of shots -- I seem to be getting them for one reason or another all the time.  I'm not looking forward to any side effects that I may experience, but the descriptions I've read of even the most severe side effects still seem manageable.  And I had no side effects at all from the first shot, three weeks ago.

I wasn't looking forward eagerly to another wait of an hour and forty minutes -- standing in line in a poorly ventilated hallway -- as I was for the first shot.  But I survived that super-spreader event without contracting the virus, and I now already had partial immunity from the first shot.

(In the event, I waited ZERO minutes this time -- I walked in and was taken immediately to the vaccination room.)

I guess it was a function of not having enough to occupy my time and brain during this pandemic.  Back in my days of legal practice, I would have had too much to occupy my mind to brood over a shot, and would have just slipped in an hour or so on my calendar to get it.

So, anyway, in a couple of weeks I'll have full immunity, to the extent Pfizer can give it.  Of course, I now have to worry about the "variants" creeping across the Atlantic from Britain and South Africa.  Will my Pfizer immunity block those little buggers?  Or not?   

Total "normality" -- as known in 2019 -- is still an aspiration, not an accomplished fact.  But I feel considerably safer than I did a month ago.