- Wednesday evening at 5 pm I checked my email, and there was an invitation from the county to schedule a time for my vaccine! I’d been resigned that I would need to wait until next Monday.
- I don’t know what category I was in. I had read that we immune-suppressed were being pushed to the end for our own protection, because no one knew how we’d react. So I suppose the organ donors on immunosuppressants were in the earlier phase as guinea pigs? Who knows, who cares, who is going to argue? I picked the earliest appointment: Thursday at 2:45 pm.
- It was a long stretch between Wednesday at 5 to Thursday at 2:45. I stayed up late, too excited for sleep, doing research, deciding what to wear, and planning how I would dupe my body so no fluids etc. would inconvenience me. Essentially, I stopped eating and drinking after breakfast, and it was supremely successful.
- Gary went to the same venue on Monday for his second shot and had a three hour wait, so I planned for that. Then – an encouraging sign – a local Facebook friend posted she’d just been through the line at the place I was headed and it was terrific. “In and out.”
- I arrived at the gate at 2:42. A man in a military uniform checked the form they’d sent me to fill out before the appointment. Six officers belonging to what I assumed was the National Guard waved me to my parking spot.
- I was expecting a line of people inside. Nope. Just empty switchbacks populated by more uniforms than civilians. There were three people in front of me who were moving very fast. I wove through that line like it was Six Flags during a tornado watch. I just handed my form to various people and never broke stride from the trot the three people in front had established. I even commented to the last officer that I couldn’t keep up. He put me in the last seat in a “lane” of seats. I turned my head and a woman with a needle was rolling up to me. Swabbed me, grabbed my fat, gave me a shot. No pinch or anything.
- I asked her what had changed between Monday and today, because this was remarkable, and she said “I wasn’t here Monday,” which I took to mean “That was the problem with Monday.” It was 2:53, 11 minutes after I drove into the lot.
- Then I began the longest stretch, the fifteen minute wait. My vaccinator turned to the man on the other side of the aisle, jabbed him, and he clutched his arm and began screaming dramatically, clearly to get a laugh. I shared my vaccinator with the man across the aisle and that was it. One vaccinator per pair. Ten vaccinators per aisle. Unreal.
- I looked on the other side and saw a man in camo, and another man in camo with “Air Force” stitched on a label above his pocket, and I realized I have no idea what the National Guard looks like. They could have activated the Air Force, I don’t know.
- I asked them how they had turned things around so dramatically since Monday, and he said, a little cryptically, that Mistakes were Made, and they had been ironed out. Then he said, “Steam-pressed out.” I took that to mean things might be a little too efficient.
- The timer rang and the lane to my left was free to go, and after they walked out every chair was sanitized. Then it was my lane’s time to go. I was out of there in twenty six minutes. With the venue fifteen minutes from home I was home in less than an hour.
- I got the Pfizer vaccine, so a three week wait for the next one, and then two more weeks to be sure, and I can relax a little. Still wear a mask, though, so I don’t unknowingly breathe in a bug and breathe it out on someone unprotected.
- I did not get a superhero bandage like Gary and some others I know, but I will let that slide. I guess the military doesn’t supply Batman band-aids. Small price to pay.
Putting the TMI in absentminded