Having already shot my wife in the driver’s seat, the pair of vaccinators reloaded their Moderna #1 as they stood at my open window. I bared my left bicep and hung my head out the window like a dog, felt the needle touch my skin and, out of sheer relief, said “Ahh, that feels great!”
After nearly a year of fear and unrelenting wariness, of pawing around in darkness, no beacons, no sense of where we were going and when we might get there, and now, a light in the distance appeared and I slipped into a daydream.
Calling to mind a post-surgery hallucination from years earlier, I fell into a backward-facing seat on a kind of high-speed train. On both sides of me, scenes vaulted by — Neolithic women picking medicinal herbs, acolytes rapt in the teachings of Hippocrates, barbers carefully bloodletting, applying leeches, Dark Ages explorers dissecting cadavers, light streaming through Victorian operating theaters, the bubbling laboratory of Pasteur, all of it flying by, lab coat after lab coat, finally hurling me into the cluster of monitors, tubes, and alarms surrounding my hospital bed. I gasped at first, then rested atop a still rising heap of brilliance and breakthroughs, malpractice and mistakes, gleaming institutes and Nobel prizes – distilling itself into the wondrous half milliliter coursing through my veins.
Silent in the car, I scanned for side-effects, and feeling only gratitude, grabbed my phone and made appointment number two. Back off, Covid, you microscopic monster.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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