Fully Vaccinated

After a year of hiding and watching the gross incompetence of Donald J. Trump’s administration lead to so much unneeded death and suffering, the vaccine delivery promise of candidate Joe Biden and the promise fulfillment of President Biden has finally reached my household’s arms. Both Lauren and I got our second Pfizer vaccine on the 29^th.

It was non-optimal timing that this should happen on the day after our move, but that prompted a lot of the preparation that lead to our easy move and our making sure that we had an ailing bed ready upon move-in.

Side Effects

Below I will describe the side-effects. While real, they are relatively mild and they are, I can assure you, far less damaging and painful than living through the infection (even mild, like mine was last year). By all means get the vaccine. This description in no way is meant to deter you from getting a vaccine but is here to help you know how to prepare your recovery. Get it.

Our first shot’s side effects were rather mild: sore arms and we went to bed early. The day after we ate brunch out and took a nap. Not bad.

The second shot’s effects were a bit more acute. We both got it around 8:00 a.m. and things were pretty normal apart from a sore arm for many hours. But by 6:00 pm we were starting to feel real lethargy. We ordered food, drank Gatorade, took Tylenol, and called it an early night. After a good night’s sleep, I awoke to feeling perfectly exhausted. I took a sick day from work and went back to sleep.

When I woke up around 10:00 a.m., I gently creaked out of bed feeling like I had the body ache associated with the flu. Dog duty demanded Lauren and I throw ourselves out to the street. We bundled up and headed out into the breezy, but sunny, Manhattan Spring day. After a brief walk to hand in our keys to our old apartment, we headed back to our new home via Sweetgreen where we both loaded up on big, green, kale-laden salads. We shuffled back home and watched the thoroughly ridiculous and delightfully vulgar Happytime Murders.

After some more idling (and Tylenol) things were feeling a bit better by the early afternoon. We shuffled a few things around the apartment and bought food for dinner at the local grocery. We prepared the extravagance known as spaghetti bolognese and lots of water. By 11:00 pm the pain had largely subsided but I developed a curious sudden case of the sniffles that was gone by morning. Now, 48 hours after injection, I feel pretty normal. I have my eyes on some self-care for the rest of the day and won’t be doing any heavy lifting, but there were non-negligible side effects.

It’s been a rough 14 months, but with shots in arms, we’re starting to see our way back to normal.