Boosted
A few days ago Kim asked me what I thought about the idea of getting our second COVID booster shot before we started our drive back to the East Coast on Sunday. My first thought was to check quickly on Google how long one should wait after having a COVID infection before one gets and injection of a vaccine that puts more antigens of the Coronavirus into one’s blood stream. The quick research was, at best, inconclusive and admittedly so. It seems that there is little or no consensus about how long one should wait after being infected before getting a vaccination or a booster. As best I could determine, Google says one should not get a booster while the infection is active and symptomatic, and probably not while one is testing positive with a PRC test. The closest thing to hard advice was the suggestion that one should wait fourteen days after testing negative before getting the booster (presumably also being without noticeable symptoms). Yesterday marked fourteen days since I tested negative after my bout with COVID. Kim booked us for booster shots today at a local CVS Pharmacy (not our regular prescription pharmacy). This was a by-the-book operation.
As an over-65 person, I was eligible for an early first vaccination, which I got in late January, 2021. That was a Moderna vaccine for reasons known only to the place where I got the shot. I got my second dose of the Moderna vaccine a month or so later as I was supposed to. On neither occasion did I have any serious reaction. I believe after the second vaccine I got a mild headache/fever for an hour the night I got my shot, but that was it. When the CDC determined that we all needed boosters six months later, it took another two months before I could get mine. At that time, my daughter signed me up from New York (she was all over the process due to her natural instincts). I drove over to La Jolla to get the booster and took what they had, which was the Pfizer booster. At the time, the literature was suggesting that there was nothing wrong with mixing and matching brands of vaccine (at least between Moderna and Pfizer…not so much for J&J) and that it might indeed be more protective to mix and match. Once again, I had no reaction to the vaccine and all went along as normal.
As the next six plus months passed, I managed to stay COVID-free, even though Kim got infected after the Christmas holidays (it was a modest and not-severe infection that ran its course within two weeks like ti was supposed to). By that time, the CDC was talking about the need for a second booster and was starting to issue approvals using the same vulnerability standards as before, which made me eligible sooner rather than later. As I was thinking about it all, we were headed for a motorcycle trip to Moab, Utah. I rode through a number of Native American reservations that had been hard hit with COVID infections, and I suspect I managed to finally catch the bug somewhere along that way. I was hesitating getting the second booster since we are planing to go to Spain and Portugal in late September and we wanted to get our boosters as close to then as possible. My recent bout with the beast (which was quite mild) as well as the news of increasing infection rates around the world, has made us rethink our timing and to have Kim suggest that we get boosted this week. Our expectation was that it would not interfere with our travel plans for Sunday.
So, we went off to CVS at our appointed time. There were a meaningful number of people there at their Clinic and fewer chairs than people. Since there were people with their kids, we must have looked old and enfeebled, and they freed up two plastic chairs for our use. I asked to use the restroom and was told that they were sorry, but they were only allowing their own staff to use what were originally designated as customer restrooms. I grumbled about that, but decided to muscle through and just get my booster and leave. When the male nurse came to administer the booster, he was concerned that I had not been allowed to use the restroom. He gave me the booster and then I learned that Kim had also agreed at the pharmacy’s recommendation, to get the pneumonia vaccine (I’m not sure I even knew there was such a thing). So the nurse gave me both shots, one right above the other on my left arm.
The nurse then covertly gave me the restroom key and told me not to tell any other customers that I was being allowed to use the restroom. I don’t pretend to understand CVS’s game with the restrooms, but I used it and dutifully and quietly gave the nurse back the key without causing a scene. We were supposed to wait for fifteen minutes to be sure that we had no adverse reaction to the vaccines, but once I handed over the restroom key (which was in about three minutes from when I got the shots) we said we were leaving and felt fine and our nurse seemed to lose interest in the protocol and just waved goodbye to us. Lucky for us, neither of us are too sensitive to the vaccines and neither of us have ever had any adverse reaction.
When I got home I was very conscious of my upper left arm. I had actually had a sore left shoulder for several days, most likely caused by sleeping on my left side. So, my shoulder was sore to start with and pretty much on the upper outer rotator cuff tendon, which is pretty much the same area where I was looking at two flesh-colored bandaids, placed there by the CVS nurse. How exactly does one sort out soreness and do the attribution analysis? I did poke at my upper arm a few times and rotated the shoulder and I really didn’t feel like there was anything happening due to the vaccination. The thought process was complicated by the fact that there were two bandaids on my arm. Where the COVID booster was such a quick shot that I hardly even knew it had been given to me, the pneumonia vaccine was a long, slow and slightly painful injection. I don’t understand the science of it all well enough to know whether there is a correlation between the pain of the injection and the reaction to the injection as registered via arm swelling and pain. It was a non-existent issue since my arm just didn’t hurt.
I went to bed wondering how I could sleep on my shoulder without changing the reality of how my shoulder would tell me if I was having a reaction to one or both of the vaccines. I was unusually tired but was otherwise feeling no other symptoms I could relate to. When I woke up the next morning my arm still wasn’t so sore though I could sense a little tenderness from either the injections or the vaccines or maybe just another night’s sleeping on my left side. What was different was that I woke up after an uninterrupted sleep of almost seven hours and I still felt tired for some reason. Now THAT had to be because of the vaccinations since I almost never feel tired in the morning, especially after a full uninterrupted night’s sleep. Everyone says that getting boosted is important, and I am inclined to believe that, as I have believed Dr. Fauci and the CDC all along. Anything we can each do to keep this nasty bug at bay from ourselves and others, we should do. I’ve now made it through the day and I have to say that whatever the benefits I have obtained from these vaccinations, I have paid a minuscule price for getting boosted.