A Facebook Post About Covid Vaccination

 (I posted the following comment this morning to a friend’s Facebook page in a thread discussing vaccination.)

On a personal note, my wife and I were fully Modernized months ago. We had slightly unpleasant but not severe reactions to the second injection and have experienced no discernible ill effects since.

Nevertheless, we recently attended a major bowling tournament for a couple of days in a crowded bowling center, and even though masking was required and practiced by all spectators and competitors, it was a reckless risk we shouldn’t have taken in the middle of a Delta Covid surge.

Four days after we came home, my wife began experiencing subtle symptoms of possible infection and subsequently tested positive. But her symptoms remained mild and have now virtually disappeared.

Moreover, I never had any symptoms to speak of but got tested Tuesday and received my test result this morning. It was negative.

I don’t know how much of a role our being fully inoculated with a mRNA vaccine played in this very favorable outcome, but I think it’s pretty reasonable to surmise that getting vaccinated didn’t harm either of us and that, given my wife’s age and especially mine, it may well have spared us serious illness or worse and with no apparent downside.

And even before this recent brush with Covid, ever since we were fully vaccinated, we’ve experienced so much less anxiety about becoming infected and severely sickened with this deadly and pervasive disease than we did previously.

Vaccination removes or at least greatly lessens the terrible, nagging fear of catching Covid and makes life so much more enjoyable.

I guess some dispel this fear by underestimating or even outright denying the threat Covid poses to the unvaccinated. But that seems to me like a perilously risky strategy with potentially deleterious if not deadly consequences for them personally, for their loved ones, and, collectively, for society at large.

I say don’t be foolish. Get vaccinated. Do it for yourself. Do it for your loved ones and friends and coworkers and other people around you. Do it for your country. And do it for the world.

 

Taking a Foolish Covid Risk

I did a very foolish thing late last month. I did it out of love for my lifelong favorite sport and its practitioners, but that's no excuse.

I went with my wife to a major professional women's bowling tournament and spent two days in a crowded bowling center during a surging pandemic worse than anything the world has experienced since the 1918 influenza pandemic.

Yes, I had a great time watching the world's best female professional bowlers compete in arguably their most prestigious tournament. Yes, everyone was masked inside the building. And, yes, we were both fully Modernized. But it wasn't worth the risk of still catching a disease that has killed millions and severely sickened and debilitated many millions more over less than two years. I should have known better. I did know better. But I did it anyway because I felt like I just had to see all those great bowlers up close and personal come what may.

Four days after we returned home, my wife began feeling a little odd. She reported intermittent piercing pains in her head she said she'd never felt before, a somewhat unusually dry if not semi-sore throat, and mild muscle aches and bodily fatigue. She wasn't sure that it wasn't her allergies acting up or something else innocuous, but when those symptoms persisted, she got tested at work for Covid and was informed the next day that she was positive. 

By that time, I was feeling a little "under the weather" as well and even developed some unusual diarrhea for half a day after prolonged lower digestive tract discomfort the day before, so I decided to get tested too. I did that yesterday and am awaiting my result while assuming and acting as though I'm infected until I receive it. And if my result is negative, I'm a little afraid that the exposure I may have had to people infected with Covid while waiting in the long, serpentine line ahead of and behind me outside and inside the testing center may have infected me.

My wife and I now feel almost back to normal, and if one or both of us doesn't take a turn for the worse like has been known to happen with some after they thought they were out of the woods, I will consider us exceedingly blessed.

And I will have learned my lesson. No more needless venturing into precarious places and situations until the pandemic is no more. Yes, maybe my wife didn't catch Covid on our trip. And maybe I don't have it or didn't catch it from the trip either. Maybe I caught it from my wife who caught it somewhere else, or I caught it somewhere else. But it doesn't much matter. The aforementioned "lesson" is to not take needless risks in the time of surging Covid-19 no matter how tempted I am to do so.

Not Just Another Birthday Post

For years, I’ve published birthday blog posts where I’ve said I don’t know if I’ll be alive for my next birthday. Well, that’s never been truer than today.

This is not only because I’m a year older and closer to my end whenever that will be, but also because a deadly viral pandemic called Covid-19 is raging around the globe sickening people and claiming lives at exponential rates of increase, and older people are especially prone to die from it with respiratory failure and cardiac arrest.

I am now closer to 70 than I am to 60, placing me squarely and ominously in the “older people” camp, and I may even have one or more co-morbidities of an, as yet, undiagnosed nature that render me even more vulnerable to the virus’ death grip than does my age alone. I’ve never lived through such a time of overt existential threat, discounting, perhaps, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and I’m far from certain that I’m going to come out the other side of this one.

So, this could be my last birthday blog post. Perhaps even my last blog post of any kind. Or maybe there will be many, many more if I not only come through this plague intact, but also renew my desire to write and publish after having passed through an extended dry spell of disillusionment with trying to write anything worth saying and sharing.

It’s not that I have something profound to say here today. I just want to indelibly mark this occasion rather than let it pass unrecognized. I want to express my deep gratitude for the life I’ve been fortunate to live. I say “fortunate” because I don’t begin to deserve the comforts I’ve enjoyed or the pleasures and joys I’ve experienced. I’ve wasted my life and burdened others unconscionably and let them down and worse over the decades.

But if I can make it through this pandemic with my modest passions and abilities intact, maybe I can accomplish something before the end finally comes. I wake up every morning grateful to be alive to greet another day, and I go to bed each night reciting the following prayer of my own composition:

“Lord, please forgive me and everyone else for all the unjustifiable harm we’ve caused ourselves and others and for all the times we could and should have helped ourselves or others but didn’t. And, Lord, please help all of us to do and be our very best from now on and to mindfully shine as bright beacons of wisdom, strength, equanimity, compassion, and lovingkindness lighting the path of goodness, truth, and beauty.”

If I have appreciably longer to live than I think I might, my greatest hope is that I can become a fuller and more radiant embodiment of my nightly prayer for everyone in my life.

Happy Birthday to me in the Time of Covid-19, and thanks to everyone living and long passed who’ve made it possible for me to sit here this evening writing this post in gratitude for my bountiful blessings, remorse for my failings, and deep desire to do better with the time and opportunities that remain.

Genocidal Bioweapons

Yesterday I took my car in for maintenance, and, while I sat in the waiting room, I watched a History Channel program called "Last Days on Earth" that listed what it said were the greatest threats facing the Earth and humankind. Number two on the list, just behind climate change brought on by misguided human activity, was the ominous possibility of a pandemic deadly enough to wipe out virtually all of the human race. A naturally mutated pathogen such as H5N1 could be bad enough, but suppose some nutcake with the knowhow combined something like Ebola with another pathogen as contagious as the common cold and released it. The consequences could be horrifying and catastrophic beyond imagination.

I have to think that this is the greatest single threat we face from terrorism. It seems far more doable than a nuclear bomb and even more devastating. Maybe it won't happen because even the craziest terrorist should realize that once he or she unleashes such an indiscriminately destructive bioweapon, there's no controlling it, and everyone, including the terrorists and their loved ones, will end up being terrorized and probably dead. This defeats the purpose of terrorism--to terrorize one group to benefit another. But there may be capable people who really ARE demented enough, perhaps with the ungodly help of warped religious apocalypticism, to perpetrate this genocidal act in the name of a justly wrathful Allah or God or whomever, and that will be that. Talk about Pandora's Box!

One of my big concerns with shows like "Last Days" is that they may help to bring about the horrific cataclysms they talk about by giving the right person the wrong idea at the right time to spur them to successfully act on it. Of course, the same thing could be said about this blogpost, with the major difference being that yours truly may now be about the only one reading this blog any longer. I think it's a pretty safe bet that Osama has "better" things to do with his time.

But still I wonder if and when the pandemic of all pandemics will come, and I hope to God it's no time soon.