The Poet Gets the Second Vaccine Shot

Yesterday I drove to campus to help open, and then I drove to Publix to get my second vaccine shot.  Then I drove back to campus and waited to see if I would have any ill effects:

This morning I woke up monitoring my body, as I do most mornings.  Menopause has wrecked my ability to know if I'm truly hot or cold.  So this morning I have more chills than usual, which I'm assuming is because of the shot, since the AC hasn't cut on recently.  But the chills also seem in the range of my body's regular reactions without having had a vaccine.  I'm able to drink coffee this morning without sweating, so in some ways, it's a plus.

This morning, I woke up with aches and pains in my joints, but that, too, is not unusual.  Yesterday I had the same assortment of aches and pains, so I'm assuming it's not related to the vaccine.

My arm hurts less than it did the morning after the first shot, but I'm still glad that I don't have work that requires lifting today.  I have a bit of a headache, but that could be for any number of reasons.

This morning, I'm thinking about May and June of 2020, when students were returning to campus to do their labs in person, and I would wake up early, early even for me, wondering how on earth we were going to keep everyone safe.  I remember a moment when I lay there in the dark realizing we were all going to get sick.  I felt a fatalism about it, and then I got to work figuring out ways to make the odds better for us, to reduce the risks of infection.

So far, we have had a few sick students, but none of them got sick by being exposed to a sick classmate.  And when they got sick, they were compliant with our quarantine procedures.  We've had a few faculty members grumble about whether or not students were really sick--were they just trying to avoid tests and due dates?  But they, too, have been compliant with the requirement to work with sick students so they wouldn't feel pressure to lie about exposure so that they didn't fall behind.  It's led me to rethink all of our policies about late work and sickness and powering through and what we require.

I am looking forward to a wide variety of activities, should we ever "return to normal," and I'm hoping that some activities don't come back.  I'm really looking forward to the day when a cough is just a cough again, not a signifier of impending doom.  I'm looking forward to smelling the bag of coffee just because I love the rich smell, not because I'm making sure I still have a sense of smell, since the loss of the sense of smell is one of the most common early symptoms of COVID-19.

I am grateful for all the ways that this will be possible, and I'm aware of some fortunate timing.  As Megan McArdle says, in this article in The Washington Post, "Imagine what might have happened if covid-19 had hit in 2000 instead of 2020. The virus could have traveled as quickly down those economic superhighways. But the first in a series of seminal papers by Karikó and her colleagues was still five years from being published [that work would lead to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines], and work on adenovirus vaccines, such as those from Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca, was also in early innings. We might well have had to make do with less effective vaccines, like the dead-virus vaccine from Sinovac, or simply wait until at least 70 percent of the population had gotten sick."

I am so grateful for these mRNA vaccines, and I'm grateful to have gotten my second shot.  I'm grateful to live in this world that science has built for us, and I'm hopeful that we can keep working to transform the world, through science and through art and through compassion.