First Shot in the Arm
May. 2nd, 2021 08:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmer“Encouraging vaccination by positive example so that life can become a bit less worried and risky for everyone” would seem to be a good thing. Living in a country stuck depending on vaccine imports while seeing reports from a country using its domestic production for itself, though, did get me thinking that to make a big deal of getting a first shot could seem like “boasting to the less fortunate.” That might not have seemed a big problem when it was announced people my age and a little younger could apply for Oxford-AstraZeneca doses in my province. To do that we had to contact individual pharmacies to see if there were any doses available, and when web sites didn’t offer appointments and a cell phone outage kept me from making any calls on the first day of availability I drifted all too close to a casual shrug and the thought that since I was fortunate enough to be able to work from home I ought not to worry too much for myself and hope those with greater determination were also in greater need.
Then, someone from work I was communicating with said to “call your doctor” and follow up on reports of doses available in a clinic a few towns away. Also fortunate enough to have a doctor I’d been to a few times before, I called and left a message, and they called me back saying I could get an appointment at a downtown clinic in my own city in two weekends’ time. It seemed almost too good to be true, and I kept imagining I’d get there at the time of the appointment only to find out something or other just hadn’t worked out.
When I did get to the clinic in good time for the appointment, though, everything did work out. For a while, though, a sense of lassitude led to a fuzzy sense that perhaps I didn’t need to worry about getting my thoughts together to the point of “boasting.” I’m certain that means an immune response is beginning to develop, though. It’ll take a few weeks yet before I’m as safe as one dose can make me, but if I can get a bit further away from an early-seeded concern that touching anything brought in from outside means “don’t touch this and this and this until you’ve washed your hands” maybe that’ll be for the good.
Then, someone from work I was communicating with said to “call your doctor” and follow up on reports of doses available in a clinic a few towns away. Also fortunate enough to have a doctor I’d been to a few times before, I called and left a message, and they called me back saying I could get an appointment at a downtown clinic in my own city in two weekends’ time. It seemed almost too good to be true, and I kept imagining I’d get there at the time of the appointment only to find out something or other just hadn’t worked out.
When I did get to the clinic in good time for the appointment, though, everything did work out. For a while, though, a sense of lassitude led to a fuzzy sense that perhaps I didn’t need to worry about getting my thoughts together to the point of “boasting.” I’m certain that means an immune response is beginning to develop, though. It’ll take a few weeks yet before I’m as safe as one dose can make me, but if I can get a bit further away from an early-seeded concern that touching anything brought in from outside means “don’t touch this and this and this until you’ve washed your hands” maybe that’ll be for the good.