Frumpy Middle-aged Mom: I was so excited to get my shot against the coronavirus

Honestly, did you ever think in your entire life that you’d be jumping with joy to get a shot in your arm?

Well, I certainly never did, but that’s what the pharmacy tech who shot me up recently said everyone’s been telling him, as he injects them with the lovely, lovely vaccine that will hopefully protect me from getting sick with COVID-19. I will no longer have to be thinking about the Black Plague in Europe, with the people pulling the carts up and down the street shouting, “Bring out your dead.”

For some reason, this image has just stuck in my mind, along with that painful image of Miley Cyrus almost naked on that wrecking ball and Grumpy Cat doing, well, anything.

If you haven’t gotten your vaccination yet, and you’re going to a large mass site, here’s a clue: Bring a book. Seriously, you may be several decades older by the time you get to the front of the line. And your phone version will be outdated. So you’ll want to have a big fat book, or your Kindle, which of course can hold all the knowledge of mankind plus some recipes for lasagna.

I went to a pharmacy and the whole thing took 15 minutes. If you can go this route, do it. I don’t really grasp the concept of these megasites where they make you walk and then wait in long lines. I couldn’t stand in a line like that. If you organized that, just out of curiosity, what were you thinking? That if people already had COVID and didn’t know it, they’d die waiting in line and then free up the vaccine for someone else?

Anyway, the whole thing brought back memories of when I had to take the kids to be inoculated, shortly after I adopted them. They were missing some of their childhood shots, so the doctor wanted to hit them all in the same day. Meaning five shots. At one time. Not as much fun as you might think.

Happily, that was the worst vaccination experience we ever had. Except maybe before our safari trip to Africa, when we went to the travel clinic to get even more shots. All my guidebooks that said we needed to show a yellow fever vaccination certificate to enter Kenya. Seriously. ALL the guidebooks said this. My insurance wouldn’t cover it, so I had to shell out $75 per shot, $225 total, for us to be inoculated against yellow fever.

Guess what? There’s no yellow fever in Kenya. No one ever wanted to see our costly certificates because … there’s no yellow fever in Kenya. This is when I realized that guidebook authors sometimes just copy from each other without verifying the information. Also learned this when we went to Cuba. So keep that in mind for future trips. So that vaccination experience hurt my pocketbook, not my arm.

The best thing about having everyone in my house vaccinated now is that I don’t have to spend 7.8 hours each day scrolling through my phone, desperately trying to find an appointment. Anywhere. Antarctica? We’ll fly there, no problem.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do with my time now. For awhile I amused myself by getting vaccination appointments for all my friends, but they’ve all been shot up now. Maybe I should watch something on Netflix. I heard they have shows on there now.

Unlike many of you, I personally haven’t been much concerned about getting the coronavirus. Yes, I followed all the protocols and, yes, I have a compromised immune system due to that annoying thing called cancer. But here’s the deal: I already have a (potentially) fatal disease, and there just isn’t any room left in my brain to worry about another one.

The cancer got there first, so when all the stuff came out about COVID-19 and people were coming unglued and washing the soles of their shoes before they came in the house and wiping down the paper bags delivered by the Instacart people and only venturing out of their houses as far as the mailbox — but only when no one was around, I just could not join in the frenzy.

I went out to eat (masked and outdoors). I socialized with friends in my front yard (6 feet apart.) I went walking (in my gimpy, legs-not-really-working way.) In short, I just lived my life. And it was fine.

Now, some of my friends are emerging from their houses, looking like Boo Radley in “To Kill A Mockingbird.” Blinking in the sunlight and flinching whenever someone walks within 20 feet. Pasty-faced and bat-like. One of them even went to Happy Hour with me last week, and not my Zoom Happy Hour version. (Which hopefully will continue, as long as you write in and say you want it.) She kept looking around like someone who’d been marooned on a desert island and finally saw actual people again.

Meanwhile, I’m dancing in the streets every chance I get. Hope you are too.

Source: Orange County Register